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No recycling without collection : the central role of distribution in the circularity of agricultural plastics
AUTHOR : Fabien VIRMONT, Agricultural Equipment Market Manager, Océalia
Collecting used plastics is the essential first step to recycling them. Circularity in the Greater West could not exist without the collection operators, who make their sites available to receive and temporarily store the waste brought to them by farmers. Océalia, an agricultural cooperative covering the Poitou-Charentes and Limousin regions, specialises in the distribution of agricultural supplies to its members, including forage conditioning and conservation products (CCF), agricultural films, tying twine and round bale nets. Its Agroéquipement manager explains Océalia’s pioneering role and its involvement in the management of used plastics.
The volumes distributed each year exceed 1000t, and it very quickly became clear to us that it was no longer possible to leave our members to manage the end-of-life of CCFs on their own, and what’s more, to do so illegally, since burial or burning have been banned since 2002.
First collections in 2007
The need to find a solution for our members led us to set up an initial test collection in 2007 at a depot in the Creuse region, then to extend the operation to the whole of the Limousin region at 30 collection sites the following year. This first full-scale collection in 2008, open to all CCF products including roundballer netting, enabled us to recover 469t of used agricultural plastics from 517 members, which we then had taken back by local operators.
In 2009, we signed a contract to join the A.D.I.VALOR programme for managing used agricultural films, which had just been set up by the French Committee for Plastics in Agriculture via its APE¹ commission. It was a beneficial contract, as it enabled us to get through the 2008 crisis without a hitch, when many collection operators were left with used plastics on their hands following the collapse in the price of recycled materials. We then signed a contract for the management of FIFAU (used twine and netting), which we had been managing locally until its launch in 2013.
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