A family in France produces just 11 pounds of trash per person every year
The Poirier family, who lives near Nantes, consists of a mom, a dad, three kids, a cat and... very little trash. Claire, Emmanuel, Matthias, Elsa and Jade generate eleven pounds of waste per head each year. This is almost 50 times less than what ends up in the garbage cans of the average Frenchman!
Everything began six years ago. “Back then, our income plummeted,” Claire tells us. “My husband was laid off and then found a job that paid only a third of what he’d made before. I decided to take parental leave to take care of our two daughters.” For a family that was not used to tracking their expenditures, it was an adjustment. First, the Poiriers turned to the lowest-price items at supermarkets and discount stores, but that did not work well for them. “We found that canned food was of poor quality, the products were too fatty,” Claire remembers.
Eating well for less
“So we thought about it and decided to try something different. We are lucky to live in the countryside, in a village that had a local farmers’ association that sells organic produce at a reasonable price. We liked the fact that we were supporting a local farmer.”
As the Poiriers switched to local and organic produce, their community imposed a new tax designed to reduce household waste. “You pay by volume,” Claire explains. “This got us thinking about the waste we generate.” In order not to exceed twelve 48-gallon bins (180-liter bins) annually, the cheapest garbage pick-up option offered by the community, the family reorganized their house a little bit. “To optimize our triage, we put the compost bin underneath the sink and arranged the trash cans to make them more accessible so that we could really sort each trash item.”
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