The future place of recycling in household waste policy: the case of France

To be rightly implemented, an environmental policy ought to set an institutional framework (goals, rules and instruments) which incents decentralised actors to adopt the appropriate range of technologies. In the household waste management policy, the development of valorisation techniques (and particularly recycling) must be supported by convenient instruments and incentives. The paper analyses the problems encountered with the French household waste policy to ensure the takeoff of recycling techniques. At the moment, a rather under-proportioned institutional setting leads to favour the adoption of incineration with energy recovery at the expenses of recycling. This tends to create a structural bias in favour of incineration.