In 1883 the Poubelle decree sanctions the birth of separate waste collection in France

How we have already dealt with in other articles, which dealt with waste management in medieval history and in the period between the industrial revolution, it is interesting to see how it was managed in France, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and why it became so urgent to address the waste argument.

The enlightenment period, which succeeded the French Revolution, brought with it a series of interesting social changes and in the field of urban organization, in fact, the main cities continued to attract the population from the countryside, with the consequence of having to manage a series of health problems never faced in the past.

An urbanization without rules, which tried to give a quick housing solution to the growing population, but had exposed important problems that needed to be solved professionally.

We can recall the treatise of 1769 by the architect Pierre Patte, in which an attempt was made to give an order and priorities for intervention on the issues of purification of water, the location of hospitals, the location of cemeteries, industrial activities, street cleaning and the age-old problem of fires.

At the same time science began important steps to meet the sanitation needs of crowded environments, for example, lime chloride was used to disinfect hospitals , prisons and other meeting places, in order to prevent epidemics.

Towards the end of 1700 science, politics, industry, pervaded by a new form of state, born with the French revolution and the Enlightenment drive, they began to deal with the issue of urban and industrial waste.

To make the study of effective solutions in this field more and more necessary, it was the beginning of the industrial revolution, which we can ideally place it in 1779, when James Watt patented the steam boiler, with which thermal energy was transformed into mechanical energy.

The steam engine revolutionized the life and work of the population as the progressive replacement of human and animal muscle strength that was used in the past created a emigration of people in search of work, from the countryside to the cities where the new steam-mechanized factories resided.

This phenomenon created an incredible push towards urbanization, with the consequent need to manage urban and industrial waste and public hygiene. Furthermore, the new industrial sector also had an exponential growth, with the construction of factories in a disorderly way and without any type of urban planning, corolled by working-class neighborhoods that arose near the industrial activities.

With increasingly populous urban agglomerations and continuous production growth, an environmental and health problem broke out in a short time that led to epidemics, with an increase in deaths. Degraded environmental conditions developed, precisely because urban waste was not disposed of, industrial waste was dumped in the countryside or in rivers and black water was not conveyed and treated properly.

At that time there was a thought called "classic" in which the well-being of a nation also passed through industry and the increase in production, as well as enriching the owners, however, this was seen with a collective well-being.

This theory, as reported in 1776 by Adam Smith, was based on the incessant accumulation of capital that made a country prosperous and imposed a tacit consensus between industry and politics , where the latter left a free hand to industrialists to exploit natural resources and the working population for the supreme good of the nation.

The ideology of growth and liberal politics constituted two enormous obstacles for the organization of a municipal service until the mid-1800s, especially in England. collection and disposal of urban waste.

But to question the lack of social self-control of these theories, came the epidemics (1831 and 1849) that mainly hit the districts of the industrial proletariat, making people rethink to the need to organically regulate the collection of waste, cleaning and decorum of the cities.

Science in the meantime, by Louis Pasteur and his studies on microbiology, discovered a close link between organisms that live and proliferate on waste and in manure, establishing a correlation between these and the spread of some diseases.

His studies on alcoholic fermentation processes led him to discover that the "ferment" is a mobile living being, able to reproduce both in presence and absence of oxygen and invisible to the naked eye: in this way the concept of microbe was born.

In France, a strong hygienist current was born which asserted itself with the decree signed in 1883 by the prefect Eugène Poubelle, in which all the citizens of Paris were obliged to equip themselves with three containers in which to insert separately: paper and rags, then the organic and finally a bin for ceramics and glass.

These three bins, tightly closed, had to be deposited outside the front door every morning, so that they could be collected by the municipal staff.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.