Darwin Takes Out the Garbage

There is no such place as “away,” to which you can throw things. In America, you can throw them into a big, expensive hole in the ground called a landfill, and in Brazil, you can pile them up in a huge dump right next to where thousands of people live in favelas.

In France, we do not just throw things away. Our “garbage” has four possible places to go:

• Recyclables, all different kinds mixed together, get picked up by the city once a week.
• Non-recyclables get picked up by the city on a different day of the week. These go to landfills.
• Individuals take glass to recycling depots. A lot of people recycle a lot of glass.
• Food waste, which used to just go into the non-recyclable trash, now goes into special bins located in many neighborhoods.

When food waste recycling began about a year ago, I wondered if anyone except me would do it. But I was frequently seeing people tote their food wastes in little paper bags inside of plastic bins that allowed aeration. Then, on 27 juin 2025, I received a magazine published by the municipality of Hoenheim that showed that the food waste recycling program was a tremendous success.

In 2024, Hoenheim collected 109 metric tons of food waste, which they took to fermentation chambers where it produced 13000 cubic meters of methane (natural gas), 38 metric tons of oil, and 12 metric tons of compost. The figure of 13000 cubic meters of methane is very significant. In America, if you want more methane, all you have to do is some fracking. But in France, fracking is illegal. And France does not want to depend on Russia to supply natural gas; I mean, who would want to depend on Russia for anything?

I remember reading a Newsweek article in 1978 about a company called Calorific Recovery Anaerobic Processes (CRAP) which got methane from fermenting cow dung and used it to power engines. I do not know if this company still exists, but the news is all over the web about how to do this. America has had 47 years to start doing this. In France, it is now a reality.

In this video, I am taking a little basket of food waste to a collection point in Hoenheim, Alsace, France.