On the forecourt of the MOBE, the museum of Orléans, are enthroned large transparent tanks in the shape of test tubes.
Inside, the inhabitants of Orleans throw away what comes to hand.
Plastic bottles, cans, sandwich wrappers… In the translucent columns, the level rises.
Next to it, an educational panel explains that this is not, as one might almost believe, a new form of urban garbage cans, but a scientific experiment on the way in which man marks his environment.
"We can imagine that these receptacles could be cores of sediment that geologists of the future could extract from the ground in fifty million years", explains Laure Danilo, curator and head of the MOBE, who also wants to "call on these gestures which can seem innocuous”.
A new geological era
Through the example of the accumulation of waste - especially plastic, ubiquitous from the most remote lands to the depths of the oceans - the aim is to illustrate the indelible mark that man leaves on earth.
"Scientists see it as the advent of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene", in which human beings are the first actors in the change that affects them and that affects the planet, she continues.
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The experiment began in mid-May and will end on June 2 with a conference by a CNRS researcher, Jérémy Jacob, who has worked hard to dissect the discharges present in the Orleans sewers, and who was thus able to trace the thread of local history over a period of 70 years.
And the subject will no doubt be taken up later since it is one of the general themes dealt with by the MOBE.