A ritual.
Like every time they shop at Leclerc in St-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime), Elif and his mother, Didem, feed B: bot, which recycles plastic bottles.
A green light tells them that they can slip a bottle into the machine which shows the path they have traveled to the crusher live on a screen.
A few seconds later, it is transformed into a flood of pretty transparent or colored sequins, as the case may be, which fall into different bins.
The machine thanks Elif and Didem for having saved “36 bottles today”.
Mother and daughter will leave with a voucher of 36 cents, to be used on their next purchases at Leclerc.
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Everything is accepted except bottles of milk and shampoo as well as those without barcode.
Installed here for two months, after a phase with prototypes, the B: bots swallow between 1,500 and 2,000 bottles per day, while the bins of glitter fill up tirelessly.
Once full, they leave in Leclerc trucks to a regional warehouse.
It is only at this stage that the GreenBig team, the creators of these machines, take charge of them and take them to professional recyclers, who transform them into… new plastic bottles.
17 billion plastic bottles sold each year in France
Success is there.
“In two months, we have already installed 80 machines, and we will deploy 350 more in 2021 and 1,000 in 2022,” reveals Benoît Paget, one of the co-founders of GreenBig.
For the time being, it is mainly the independent networks - Leclerc, Système U and Intermarché - who have said banco.
They gain a potential customer traffic in addition, but also and above all a green image of friends of the planet.
As for the plastic bottle market, it is impressive.
"In France, 17 billion are sold each year, and 500 billion in the world", echoes Benoit Paget, who also recalls that the plastic manufacturers are very demanding of these small flakes.
And for good reason: a law requires them to have at least 25% recycled material in their bottles by 2025. Some are already going further, such as the American giant Pepsi, which will be 100% recycled from 2022.
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Consumers favor these recycling operations.
This is the case of Laura and Kevin, a couple of students, who previously did their shopping at Intermarché, but now opts for Leclerc.
“We put our bottles there every time,” they explain.
it is important to know that they are really recycled, that we are doing something for the planet.
"If more than 90% of consumers, many of them retirees, opt for a voucher of one cent per bottle - some, in this working-class neighborhood even arrive with a huge bag of 150 bottles, collected in a building. or a local Ephad - Laura and Kevin preferred to donate to the NGO Oceans without plastics.
Recycled plastic that is purer than that from yellow bins
"In fact, from the moment people think that what they are doing makes sense, the" constraint "of having to bring back their bottles is no longer one", decrypts Benoît Paget.
All the more so since the plastic obtained after passing through the B: bot is much more "pure" than that obtained from the famous yellow lidded bins, compressed in the form of bales but often with other recyclable waste.
"In the end, we sell a ton of our PET flakes
(Editor's note: polyethylene terephthalate)
between 500 and 600 euros, against 200 to 250 euros for PET from yellow bins," he continues.
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What about supermarkets in this virtuous model?
If they buy the B: bots, made in Dieppe, around 25,000 euros per unit, “GreenBig then buys the plastic straws from them.
So much so that after 1000 bottles swallowed per day, the investment pays off ”, calculates Benoît Paget, who is already eyeing the overseas departments and territories or abroad.
Several local authorities and town halls are also studying this promising invention.