Nine major agri-food groups reminded of their "duty of vigilance".
Three NGOs - ClientEarth, Surfrider Foundation Europe and Zero Waste France - accuse in a press release the groups Auchan, Carrefour, Casino, Danone, Lactalis, Les Mousquetaires, Picard Surgelés, as well as Nestlé France and McDonald's France, of proposing in terms of plastic pollution “vigilance plans that are at best insufficient to identify risks and prevent damage, at worst non-existent”.
Since 2017, a law obliges companies based in France and employing more than 5,000 people in the territory, or more than 10,000 worldwide, to take effective measures to prevent human rights and environmental abuses in France. their entire supply chain, in particular through a "vigilance plan".
“We want a shock of deplasticization”
"We want to create a deplasticization shock, they (these companies) need to get on the right track, with quantifiable measures", explains Antidia Citores, spokesperson for the NGO coalition, stressing that "plastic causes damage to the environment, health and human rights”.
“We have been talking with most of these companies for years”, and “these formal notices are a continuation of this dialogue, when it is clear that nothing or not enough has been done”, she justifies.
According to the law, companies have a period of three months to meet their obligations and possibly dialogue with NGOs.
At the end of this period, NGOs have the possibility of launching summonses.
"We ask them for extremely specific and individual things," explained Me Sébastien Mabile, one of the coalition's lawyers.
For example, he noted that when they exist, “strategies are based almost exclusively on recyclable products, of which we know that only a tiny part is actually recycled”.
“We ask them for a detailed trajectory on voluntary commitments,” insisted Me François de Cambiaire, another lawyer for the coalition.
McDonald's France, for its part, "regretted a communication which does not reflect the reality of our practices and the results obtained", ensuring that it had "removed and replaced 97% of our single-use plastic packaging".
“This substantive work, initiated several years ago, has made it possible to avoid the circulation of more than 10,000 tonnes of plastic per year”, underlined the group in a reaction sent to AFP.
French households consume more than one million tonnes of plastic packaging per year
According to the latest OECD estimates, some 460 million tonnes of plastics were produced in 2019 worldwide, generating 353 million tonnes of waste, of which less than 10% is currently recycled and 22% is dumped in fly dumps. , burned in the open air or released into the environment.
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French households consume more than one million tons of plastic packaging each year.
In France, a report by the Court of Auditors on the recycling of our waste, published on Tuesday, shows that French households also have progress to make: in 2018, they recycled only 44% of their stock of recyclable waste. .
If Paris has launched a third weekly collection of sorting bins, to promote recycling, the generalization of the "yellow trash" of all plastic waste, planned for the end of 2022, only reached 62% on the territory at the end of 2021.