Reduce, reuse and recycle. The three Rs of sustainability are perfectly materialized in Grenoble’s daily life. The city chosen as European Green Capital 2022 is a model of how citizens, with the support of the administration, have been adopting certain consumption habits that have made their homes, their trips and their daily lives more sustainable thanks to the circular economy.
The Grenoble city council proposes, encourages and promotes measures so that its neighbors can incorporate the circular economy into their daily lives. As is the case with the On your brands, ready, compost campaigns! o Throw away less, select more, who have managed to get more than half of their neighbors to deposit their food scraps in the organic waste container or even convert them into natural fertilizer with home composting systems. This compost then has a new life in pots, gardens, urban orchards and even in crop fields near the city.
In Grenoble, the circular economy applies to all types of waste. In addition to the usual recycling of cardboard, glass and packaging, the city uses sludge from its wastewater treatment plant to generate biogas, a type of renewable fuel that can power more than 100 city buses.
This is the new paradigm that cities want to aspire to because, among other things, “the circular economy makes it possible to convert something useless into useful and generate a productive process where there was none, creating a new industrial fabric and employment,” explains Jaime Martín Juez, from the Industrial Transformation and Circular Economy division at Repsol.
