Carbone

Research Project Geoffrey Grulois Andrea Bortolotti Simon De Muynck Xavier Guilmin 2021 — 2023

The Phosphore project (Innoviris Co-create 2017-2020) has brought to light a series of territorial issues, one of the main ones being the plastic contamination of household green waste (Kampelmann 2016), especially the export of green waste from municipal and regional administrations and the associated environmental and financial costs (Ecores et al. 2015; De Muynck et al. 2017; 2018; De Muynck 2018).

The Carbon project (Innoviris Experimental Platform 2021-2023) intends to experiment with technics for recirculating all green waste flows (leaves, lawns, branches, lumber) within four municipal administrations and one regional administration in the Brussels region: Anderlecht, Saint-Gilles, Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Uccle and Brussels Mobility. ULB-LoUIsE will act as a "systemic intermediary" (Klerkx & Leeuwis 2009; Klerkx 2012).

The aim is for these actors, through a cycle of experiments, evaluations and successive adjustments, to regain control of the collection and treatment of their green waste in order to make their practices greener and to make a managed transition that covers a number of elements at the same time:

  1. Environmental as it concerns the reduction of travel distances, stopping the plastic contamination of soil and the initiation of regenerative practices.
  2. Social because it concerns the valorisation of unattractive function profiles/ the creation of new transversal profiles for organic matter management in the administrations concerned.
  3. Economic because it aims at reducing expenses (logistics, processing, purchasing) and the potential activation of local activities of productive valorisation.
  4. Governance, because it aims to activate new alliances between actors that have so far been compartmentalised (between the administrations' own departments and between administrations, professionals and citizens).
  5. Legal because it intends to foster the creativity of lawyers to promote the common good (shredded branches) and the sale of the outputs created.

Contact: simon.de.muynck@ulb.be & xavier.guilmin@ulb.be