Dozens of filled garbage bags, piled up in the middle of the street… On the fifth day of the garbage collectors’ strike against the pension reform, the garbage cans are piling up. On Friday, the town hall counted 4,500 uncollected waste against 3,700 tonnes on Thursday.
“It’s not serious, when you come to eat in a restaurant”, annoyed Thursday Michaël, head waiter at the restaurant Bouillon Chartier which serves an average of 1,700 covers per day… and finds himself with ten meters of garbage cans not collected on his sidewalk. In the Sentier (IIe), Johana Marciano, director of a French brand clothing store, deplores “the catastrophic image of Paris” that the garbage cans piled up in front of her showroom send back to her foreign customers.
Unequal treatment
But in other districts, the situation is different. This is because city hall officials collect waste in half of the Parisian arrondissements (2nd, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 20th), while the other half is managed by private providers. Hence unequal situations: the collection of household waste is not disrupted in the 19th arrondissement, but is starting to be so in the 15th.
Three Syctom sites (the household waste treatment union in Paris and a large part of its suburbs) were still blocked on Friday, “as well as garages”, according to the town hall, which adds that “services favor priority sectors in terms of safety and security of pathways, as well as the clearing of food markets”.