Waste Level Rise? Scales, Spaces and Policies of Waste in New Caledonia

Abstract

New Caledonia is known as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. However, it began developing its environmental policies and improving operational measures with an eye towards prevention and protection only two decades ago. So far, waste management responsibilities have been shared among the various levels of government (municipalities, provinces and territories) by default, based on other explicitly defined responsibilities, including public hygiene, health, mining, environment and energy. This chapter analyses waste management in New Caledonia in terms of territories and levels of government. Its central hypothesis is that there is tension between increasing waste generation and territorial waste management practices. The first section discusses the qualitative and quantitative evolution of waste during the last two decades. The second section examines the subject of political and territorial responsibility for waste and how the multi-layered web of these responsibilities is constructed. The third and concluding section of this chapter builds on the case of New Caledonia to address future concerns about the Pacific’s cultural politics on waste.

1 Introduction

Although waste has long been neglected in geography and the environmental social sciences, the development of material studies has spurred renewed interest in the subject. In her overview of waste as an object of inquiry, Sarah Moore defines waste as an “object of management” or “a matter to be managed and governed at different scales” (Moore 2012, p. 786). Indeed, waste management is not merely a local issue concerned with maintaining hygienic conditions or limiting pollution; it involves complex and evolving forms of public and private intervention at various levels. Previous literature has contributed to the analysis of waste management by characterising modes of governance as moving away from the disposal mode over the last two decades (Bulkeley et al. 2005, 2007), by conducting comparative waste governance analysis (Davies 2008), by drawing attention to rescaling in waste management planning (Davoudi 2009) and by demonstrating how waste regulation makes possible the governance of the citizenry (Hird et al. 2014).

For several reasons, these questions take on an acute significance in New Caledonia. The first is concerned with the system of governance that has been in effect since the late 1990s. Building on the Nouméa Accord of 1998, the organic law (n° 99-209 of 19 March 1999) and the ordinary law (n° 99-210 of 19 March 1999) define the jurisdiction of the territory. However, nowhere do these laws address the issue of or even mention the term “waste”? Who is then responsible for waste management? This question has been met with an ad hoc response: waste management responsibilities have been shared among the various levels of government (municipalities, provinces and territories) by default, based on other explicitly defined responsibilities, including public hygiene, health, mining, environment and energy. This explains the hesitation that has characterised the organisation of waste management. For example, the waste management responsibilities in the North Province remained undefined. It was not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that it eventually was assigned to the Department of Economic Development and Environment of the North Province (DDEE-PN).

Another reason lies in the way in which waste stands among other environmental issues. New Caledonia is known as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. However, it began developing its environmental policies and improving operational measures with an eye towards prevention and protection only two decades ago. Despite its mining activity on the main island Grande Terre, the archipelago strives to distinguish itself through its outstanding environmental policies. Among its agenda-setting successes are the 2008 UNESCO classification of the New Caledonian lagoons and the 2014 creation of the Natural Park of the Coral Sea, which spans nearly 1.3 million square km (see Chap. 2 by Rodary and Chap. 4 by Pelletier in this book). Waste is a crucial topic in this “green” public policy context. It alone has the potential to jeopardise the balance of New Caledonia’s natural heritage spaces, impact the island’s unique biodiversity and threaten the health situation in various spaces, whether island, lagoon, urban or rural. The government’s interest to protect the environment from waste is evident from its political agenda items, such as the adoption of the Loi du pays n°2019-2” law on plastics (Congrès de la Nouvelle Calédonie 2019), which aims to restrict the use and spread of disposable plastic materials in terrestrial, aquatic and coastal areas throughout New Caledonia.

Comparatively, the third reason is more complex. As the more deprived provinces in New Caledonia have “caught up” in social and territorial terms through the rééquilibrage (rebalancing) policy, the consumption patterns in New Caledonia have changed. The inhabitants increasingly generate more varied types of waste. This waste results from consumption practices, which, like its modes of governance, are inseparable from the country’s long political and cultural history. However, New Caledonia is subject to contradictory influences with respect to consumption and management norms. Though it remains closely linked to France and Europe (which share both their experts and norms with the territory), it is also charting its own path, one that considers its millennia-old history and its location in the Pacific. Here, waste functions as an indicator of fundamental cultural, economic and geographic transformations. New Caledonia represents an opportunity to examine waste in all its sociocultural dimensions.

This chapter analyses waste management in New Caledonia in terms of territories and levels of government. Its central hypothesis is that there is tension in New Caledonia between increasing waste generation and territorial waste management practices. The first section discusses the qualitative and quantitative evolution of waste during the last two decades. The second section examines the subject of political and territorial responsibility for waste and how the multi-layered web of these responsibilities is constructed. The third and concluding section of this chapter builds on the case of New Caledonia to address future concerns about the Pacific’s cultural politics on waste.

2 The Rising Tide of Waste in New Caledonia

New Caledonia’s population is distributed unevenly over three provinces. Two-thirds of the population, or 182,000 out of 271,000 in 2019, lives in Greater Nouméa which includes the municipalities of Nouméa, Mont-Dore, Dumbéa and Païta (ISEE 2020) (see Chap. 11 by Pantz in this book). Outside the Greater Nouméa metropolitan area, population density is very low (on average, 15 inhabitants per square kilometre). Therefore, waste generation is very scattered, especially considering that some of the 340 communities are far from towns and suburbs on Grande Terre.

2.1 Development, Consumption and Waste

Beyond its distinctive demographic traits, New Caledonia is economically unique in Melanesia. A high level of waste generation characterises the country. Since the 1960s, its economy has developed based on a model of economic extraversion. First and foremost, the economy relies on services, public administration and financial flows tied to the residential and tourist economy (70% of GDP in 2017) (Bouard et al. 2016). Second, the economy depends on nickel exports (7% of GDP in 2017) (Bouard et al. 2016). Regionally, New Caledonia has prospered, and imports of capital and consumer goods are high. Depending on the year, they account for 40–50% of GDP, including both manufactured goods and foodstuffs (not including seafood, meat and certain agricultural products).

Although detailed results from studies of consumption that began in 2019 are not yet available, results from previous studies (Decruyenaere and Sauze 2012), provisional data and a qualitative assessment of the situation allow for a cautious two-pronged hypothesis. First, Caledonian consumption of fungible goods is high for the South Pacific zone and is not declining (New Caledonia’s per-capita GDP is third in the region, after Australia and New Zealand). Second, the socio-spatial structure of consumption is changing. As a more significant percentage of the population joins the wage economy, and fewer people engage in traditional forms of subsistence economy, consumption of imported goods in the North and Loyalty Islands provinces has increased. Consumption habits have shifted since the appearance of supermarkets in the 1980s and subsequent development beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the spread of stores to service stations across the territory, notably in the least economically developed areas. It has led to an increase in the use of precooked and pre-prepared products and the accompanying packaging. Certain parts of the territory, such as the “Voh-Koné-Pouembout zone”, have undergone significant lifestyle changes due to the availability of more products. In addition, wage economy participation rates increased dramatically following the construction and opening of the Koniambo nickel smelter in 2013 (see Batterbury et al. (2020) and Kowasch (2018); see Chap. 9 by Demmer and Chap. 8 by Kowasch and Merlin in this book). Although wage labour impacted the volume of flows, consumption habits have shifted across society, changing the nature and quantity of household waste in the process.

New Caledonia generates trash at a rate comparable to metropolitan France (354–536 kg per person per year, contingent on the year). Although reliable data are not available, the provincial government of North Province estimates that the average resident creates approximately 180 kg of household garbage per year (Province Nord 2013). As a result, the North Province generates between 8000 and 9000 tonnes of household waste each year, consisting of bulky waste, green waste, waste from economic activity and end-of-life vehicles, as well as approximately 850 tonnes of hazardous waste. In 2013, the Province’s 50,000 inhabitants generated a little under 18,000 tonnes of waste or nearly 400 kg annually. These figures vary significantly depending on whether the statistical inhabitant lives in a Kanak community (less than 300 kg per year) or an urban area (more than 450 kg per year) (Province Nord 2013).

These considerations are valid for the other provinces as well. The South Province, which accounts for three-quarters of the Caledonian population, generates over 80,000 tonnes of household waste annually or 428 kg per person. Household waste generation is notably high in Nouméa, which counts over one-third of New Caledonia’s population. The city’s affluence, the diversity of its economic structure and its urban lifestyle contribute to high waste generation rates, although they tend to level off (Province Sud 2018). The Loyalty Islands Province, which is sparsely inhabited and contains virtually no industry, generates slightly less household waste per capita, at approximately 280 kg per year (Institut d’Émission d’Outre-Mer 2019).

This data is informative but not particularly evocative. The following image (Fig. 7.1) provides a more graphic depiction of waste in New Caledonia.

The vast majority of waste generated in New Caledonia is sent to landfills, but only part of it is sent to regulated landfills. Some waste, particularly in rural areas, ends up in open dumping sites, brought there by local inhabitants or waste collection services. Household waste, animal carcasses and vegetable matter and previously sorted waste (plastic bags and boxes in the foreground of the photo) are piled up without fencing or other protection. In the best-case scenario, the sorted material is recovered, but most of it is incinerated (as in the background of Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

Open dumping site in New Caledonia. (Credit: Garcier, October 2018)

2.2 Waste Legacies

Official documents often focus on issues of household waste, which hides the fact that this type of waste accounts for only a tiny proportion of the total waste generated or present in the territory. Most waste produced in New Caledonia is associated with nickel extraction and processing, including construction and public works. Furthermore, along with mining debris, scoria from nickel processing accounts for more than three million tonnes of waste in the South Province each year or 15 times the amount of total household waste (Province Sud 2018). Add 800,000 tonnes of building and public works waste and between 30,000 and 50,000 tonnes of ash from the Prony power plant, which provides power for the nickel smelter in the South of the main island Grande Terre.

Adding sterile mining waste (mine tailings) to these quantities increases them by orders of magnitude. Between 1904 and 2017, estimates of the total tonnage of mining tailings produced in New Caledonia approached one billion tonnes (Richard et al. 2018). This is growing (Fig. 7.2) because the mined ores are increasingly poor in mineral content: today, nearly 40 million tonnes of mine tailings are produced annually.

Fig. 7.2

Annual and cumulative mine tailings produced from 1904 to 2017 throughout New Caledonia (in tonnes, DIMENC/SMC data). (Source: Richard et al. 2018)

Therefore, the waste issue in New Caledonia is inextricably linked to the local government’s economic growth decisions or those imposed on it throughout history. Nickel extraction and processing, in particular, have generated significant amounts of mining and industrial waste to manage. When analysing how specific waste management models are promoted or proposed, it is critical to bear this history in mind because models tend to conceal politically sensitive waste selectively. As a result, mining waste receives less attention than household waste and is treated like a natural problem (particularly when it comes to sediment deposits in rivers). In addition, mining waste is more difficult to investigate than household waste because the nickel industry is a highly contentious political and economic issue in New Caledonia.

2.3 The Troublesome Governance of Waste

The juxtaposition of such diverse issues within a limited territory raises the complex question of waste governance.

Generally speaking, discard studies have shown that waste governance rests on a set of norms that seek to limit waste collection and treatment to equipment constructed and managed by public or private agents and controlled by the government. At the global level, these norms have spread since the 1990s, as waste management has become increasingly focused on recycling. Local and national fiscal measures have been implemented to finance collection services and pollution absorption and to discourage certain practices such as uncontrolled dumping and car wreckage in public space. Waste regulation and management responsibilities are distributed across various levels of government, as is planning, which is often the domain of intermediary levels charged with rationalising policy at the municipal level. Additionally, consumers are now more involved in waste management and are being encouraged to adapt their daily practices to ensure that residual materials are disposed of “in the right spot”.

Growing normalisation, specific fiscal measures, responsibilities shared across different levels and the moral implication of individual citizens are all aspects of waste management in New Caledonia, with the added particularity of its organisational structure being relatively new. Most Western countries developed waste policies in the 1970s. These were reformed in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s to incorporate reuse and recycling objectives before pivoting more recently towards the circular economy (Bulkeley et al. 2007; Davies 2008). In New Caledonia, such waste policies were not instituted until the early twenty-first century. This explains why in New Caledonia open dumping sites where waste is burnt in the open air exist side-by-side with an advanced regulatory system aimed at, in particular, banning single-use plastics. Attaining sanitary and environmental objectives and changing people’s perspectives on the waste that ought to be prevented rather than eliminated are goals that require persuasion (Rocher et al. 2021). Therefore, our analysis focuses on the superposition of objectives and their multi-scalar distribution rather than on the modifications or impacts of reforms.

3 A Central Question: Who Is in Charge of Waste?

Two levels of an organisation are primarily responsible for waste management: municipalities (communes) or groups of municipalities (intercommunalités) are responsible for waste collection and treatment, while the provinces are in charge of regulation and planning. The New Caledonian level is vital for its relationship to metropolitan France and the rest of the Pacific region.

Despite this formal organisational structure, waste management is subject to numerous tensions. Resource-sharing is not easy to establish, and specific treatment schemes have been left without support. Consequently, increasing waste generation puts pressure on the collection without necessarily allowing for better recycling practices. In addressing these themes, we focus on the fiscal dimensions of these problems.

3.1 Domestic Waste Management: Municipalities in Charge

New Caledonia’s municipal code does not explicitly make municipalities responsible for waste management. Article L131-2 of the code mentions “public health” as a matter for local police enforcement. It states that it includes, among other things, “cleaning” and “removal of bulky waste” services for which municipalities or their associations “can implement a fee-for-service program” (Article L233-3). According to this article, municipalities are engaged in waste collection and treatment while adhering to each province’s environmental regulations. That said, these responsibilities are challenging for the municipalities to meet for three interconnected reasons.

The first reason relates to the financial burden of these responsibilities on local budgets. The revenue generated from waste collection and management fees does not cover the costs of these services, which must be subsidised by local budgets (most municipalities receive under 50% direct financing, according to the Calédonie Bureau d’Études (Caledonia Consulting 2019)). Of New Caledonia’s 33 municipalities, the burden falls most heavily on the rural ones, which are vast and sparsely populated. Waste management services in these areas tend to be provided directly by municipal teams, which are often poorly equipped. Urban municipalities are also seeing a gap between limited resources and growing needs. The waste collection tends to be outsourced to private service providers (in Nouméa and Dumbéa, for example, to the local business, Caléco Environnement). However, the responsibility for collecting fee payments still falls to local governments. Local budgets are burdened by increasing volumes of waste, population growth, stricter waste collection and management norms and the construction of new facilities. Inspections of old stock (such as open-air dumping grounds and end-of-life vehicles) would require further raising fees. Many municipalities, therefore, do not have the funds to pay for waste sorting, transfer or treatment facilities on their own. They are forced to count on provincial aid, ad hoc packages (ADEME or government) or loans (French Development Agency or private banks). Twelve of New Caledonia’s thirty-three municipalities have partially or entirely outsourced waste management to one of the four inter-municipal associations: service-sharing saves on costs.

The second problem is related to the spatial structure of waste services in New Caledonia. In 2014, the average volume of waste collected per week in the North Province was 72 l per community person and 146 l per townsperson (Institut d’Émission d’Outre Mer 2017), making the need for collection more urgent than ever. However, users in rural municipalities tend to be widely dispersed. In contrast to towns, where inhabitants are grouped, door-to-door household waste collection in rural areas entails long travel times: each additional household served comes at a cost. The population density in the Grande Terre municipalities (not including Greater Nouméa) is less than five people/km², which is exceptionally low even by rural standards. Outside of towns, dispersion is the rule, either in the form of agricultural properties or communities. For example, in the Hienghène municipality (population 2454 in 2019), the Ouayaguette community resides over an hour’s drive from town. Weekly waste collection by municipal teams is thus a logistical and economic challenge destined to result in deficits. For island municipalities that are entirely tribal, some waste can only be disposed of via maritime transport to Nouméa. Such municipalities include Île des Pins (South Province), the Belep municipalities (North Province) and the three municipalities of the Loyalty Islands Province: Maré, Lifou and Ouvéa. Certain small islands around Grande Terre (such as Île Ouen or Tiga, which depends on Lifou) depend on municipal waste disposal methods. These are not merely anecdotal cases, given that several islands have limited freshwater supplies, and poor waste management seriously threatens the sanitary quality of water tables and freshwater lenses.

Lastly, municipalities have to work within the context of waste practices challenged by waste collection. Until recently, the custom was to bring waste to private or public dumping grounds; while vegetable waste was gathered into piles or containers and burnt before enriching the soil, ferrous material was reused. Waste collection requires changing these practices, which is not always straightforward. As one mayor interviewed in 2018 states, “Forcing people to throw things away in rubbish bins wasn’t a social norm. Open-air dumping grounds were too deeply engrained and it took time. With the recycling centres, too, some people would go when it was closed and just dump everything out in front, at first” (Interview, 2018).

The sociocultural context in communities appears particularly distinctive and imposes specific modes of social transactions on waste management (Blanc 2009). A technician interviewed in 2019 explains how the use of new services and infrastructures was made acceptable: “We find a contact person in the community […]. We put it in place, and then we leave it for three weeks, and I stop by once a week […]. Maybe you have to go four or five times to discuss things before the operation […]. Often, when people work with a community, they do not understand that they do not live in the same timeframe, that information is not absorbed and processed the same way. After providing them with the information, it is their responsibility to share it across the community. Even if they were present, they must discuss it in the village. This is the process by which information is absorbed. […] That’s the way the system is set up” (Interview, 2019). Multiple actors interviewed stated that paying fees for waste management is not yet entirely accepted by community people, considering their modes of consumption and discard practices of composting, recycling, burning or piling up locally without assistance from the local authorities.

Municipal waste management is currently a kind of complex mosaic. Certain inter-municipalities only have rubbish dumps, such as Voh-Koné-Pouembout (VKP), while others have established civic amenity sites (mainly in the North Province). The organisation of waste management is rapidly evolving. Using Greater Nouméa as an example, the Greater Nouméa inter-municipal service (Syndicat intercommunal du Grand Nouméa) for household waste treatment was established in 2005; in 2010, its competencies increased and became a generalist service. In 2007, waste management, sorting, transportation and reuse were reformed entirely. Greater Nouméa’s municipal and open-air dumps were closed for good in 2008. The civic amenity site in the Ducos peninsula (municipality of Nouméa) was renovated and replaced with three modern recycling centres managed by Calédonienne de Services Publics (CSP Fidelio). That said, selective waste collection and sorting for recycling is not optimal because of problems related to the economic equilibrium of recycling programmes (see below) and inter-municipal organisations. Such problems include under-utilised equipment, such as in Mont-Dore’s sorting centre.

3.2 Legal Leadership and Planning Responsibility in the Provinces

Environmental law gives New Caledonia’s provinces a pivotal role when it comes to waste. Under Article 20 of the organic law (n°99-209), any authority not explicitly delegated to other levels of government (municipal, New Caledonian, French state) is the domain of the provinces. Since waste is not discussed in the organic law, it comes under the purview of the provinces. Furthermore, since the provinces are responsible for environmental protection, they also supervise waste treatment equipment. Provinces thus play a role in regulation and financing; they can help finance new infrastructures and work with municipalities to establish streams, but they play no part in day-to-day management costs. This shared authority is primarily a modus operandi resulting from legislative silence on this issue.

Here, too, things began to change more quickly after 2000. Before then, action on the part of the provinces was irregular (subsidies, agreements and so on). The South Province institution, which was established earlier, was able to act sooner in the waste sector. It also benefited from the actions of Greater Nouméa urban municipalities, unlike the North Province, which is more rural. The North and South Provinces’ environmental codes, which were adopted in 2008 and 2009, respectively, constitute the first major public policy initiatives concerned with waste management. These codes establish durable frameworks for action. Variations in the roles attributed to particular provinces in relation to waste can be explained by an appreciation for competency and territorial context disparities. For example, the Loyalty Islands Province is in a unique situation: its environmental code was established only recently, in 2016, and its territory is not only rural but also characterised by “superinsularity” (surinsularité), also known as “double” or “triple insularity”: the concept refers to the increased remoteness, isolation and dependence of small islands attached to a larger island. The Loyalty Islands Province is thus responsible both for its civic amenity sites and for transporting waste to Grande Terre.

One main objective of the North and South Provinces was, and remains, to eliminate municipal and open-air dumping sites (or landfills) and replace them with engineered landfills and recycling centres.

This civic amenity site serves as a “voluntary drop-off centre” for local residents can bring waste that corresponds to regulated streams. This waste is then transported to Nouméa for treatment. The South Province has established a network of such centres on a municipal or multi-municipal basis. The Yaté centre (80% financed by the South Province and ADEME) is the most recent (2016, Fig. 7.3); it was established after the modernisation of the municipal dump was completed in 2013. This gives some idea of the level of equipment that can be built in a very rural area: at 1 resident/km². Yaté is the municipality with the lowest population density in New Caledonia (1667 inhabitants in 2019).

Fig. 7.3

Inauguration of the Yaté civic amenity site, in 2016. (Credit: South Province 2016)

For the North Province, the waste issue did not emerge until 2009–2010, with the 2008 classification of a part of the lagoon as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the enactment of the Environmental Code, the establishment of the DDEE-PN and the renewal of the mandate of the province’s political majority. The goal of phasing out dumping sites comes with the related goal of establishing a waste storage centre in each subdivision of the North Province (known as Homogenous Territorial Entities or HTEs) in order to create a base geographic network over the province’s vast rural areas. This project is still in progress and has come up against several challenges. First, there are significant pre-existing differences in the level of waste service, as well as the degree of mutualisation among municipalities. Second, waste is not at the top of every municipality’s political priority list; drinking water conveyance, municipal roads and schools typically take precedence. Lastly, certain projects have encountered land tenure or real estate problems.

The provinces also play a strategic role in waste in terms of planning. The South Province did not establish a public policy programme for waste until 2012, with the Schéma provincial de gestion des déchets 2013–2017 (Provincial Plan for Waste Management 2013–2017). This plan assessed the current state of affairs and laid out four operational plans for waste prevention, non-hazardous waste management, hazardous waste management and building and public works waste management. Following a “cooperative effort”, the plan was updated with the Schéma provincial de prévention et de gestion des déchets 2018–2022 (Provincial Plan for Waste Prevention and Management 2018–2022). Its objectives include reducing waste production and impacts on the environment, generating structural responses to universal hazardous waste management, improving collective service coverage and increasing efforts towards reuse and the circular economy. These objectives are defined as quantitative targets, for example, reducing the amount of household waste generated and processed by 10% relative to 2016. A provincial waste management plan was drawn up for the 2013–2018 period for the North Province, but it has not been updated. Lastly, for the Loyalty Islands Province, the enactment of the environmental code has been coupled with efforts to better coordinate waste management. The province aims to establish one civic amenity site per island to put the same set of regulated waste streams as in the North and South Provinces.

3.3 At the National Level: An Ambiguous Scale of Action

At the territorial level, the New Caledonian government is responsible for certain hazardous substances. These include infectious clinical waste, unused drugs, asbestos waste, batteries and industrial and household solvents. None of these is treated locally – most are sent to New Zealand, Australia and South Korea. New Caledonia is subject to the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. The convention lays out specific rules for exportation, which requires explicit approval from host countries.

The New Caledonian Board of Mines and Energy is essential for the surveillance and regulation of these wastes, posing serious pollution risks. It is responsible for keeping inventories, particularly of materials destined for export, including collecting and redistributing tax revenues. The tax on polluting activities, established in 2003, is collected upon importing eight types of products, including lubricating oils, batteries, lead batteries and tyres. Revenues from this tax are used to combat pollution and to process these problematic materials. For example, the funds are to eliminate old stocks of end-of-life vehicles, finance infrastructure (such as new equipment or dump restoration) and organise the disposal of certain objects, such as electronic waste (Calédonie Bureau d’Études 2019).

Therefore, waste management responsibility is divided in a scalar fashion according to the nature of materials and the sanitation and environmental risks they present. Beyond the specific aforementioned wastes and the provisions for implementing international laws such as the Basel Convention, the New Caledonian government does not have organisational authority regarding waste. On the other hand, quasi-public and private organisations (called Éco-organismes in French) have significant structuring effects at this level. Such is the case for regulated waste streams. Even if the provinces are responsible for the regulatory oversight of these streams, their actual organisation involves coordination on a national scale and the heavy involvement of Éco-organismes, as we shall see shortly.

Since 2005, the South Province has established regulated waste streams for dangerous waste (oils, batteries, tyres, WEEE, vehicles) and packaging waste (paper/cardboard, plastics, aluminium cans, glass). In addition to capturing recent waste flows, the purpose of these streams is also to absorb stocks of waste that have accumulated over time. The working principle is that of “extended producer responsibility” based on the French model. In this model, authorised “Eco-organisations” handle collecting various materials at “voluntary waste drop-off centres”. The consumer pays these organisations a fee called an “Eco-contribution” (Verrax and Garcier 2017). Regulation of these streams occurs at the provincial level, but their economic organisation is an issue of national scale. The Eco-organisation TRECODEC, for example, was created in 2008, following a joint effort on the part of importers, producers and manufacturers. Soon after being authorised by the South Province, it began operating in the North Province and the Loyalty Islands Province in 2013 (Lifou and then Maré and Ouvéa), agreeing to collect and process used batteries. Thus, while each province is theoretically autonomous with respect to waste regulation, the South Province’s action (Province Sud 2018) influenced not only the actions of other municipalities but also terms of the debate by “naturalising” a regulatory choice and policy that were imported from the French metropolitan model. As long as the collected waste materials are destined to be treated (particularly hazardous waste) or recycled, this de facto coordination has an economic justification. However, from this point of view, it seems that the appropriate scale has not yet been determined, because there are insufficient materials collected to be treated or reused locally; instead this waste is exported.

The structuring effect at the national level is not limited to recyclable materials: it concerns the entire waste sector. In this respect, the similarities to metropolitan French norms and modes of action are striking, given that New Caledonia’s status gives it a great degree of autonomy in this domain. Advisory and oversight bodies, first and foremost the local branch of the ADEME, play a significant role in transposing French metropolitan frameworks to New Caledonia and working with local government at various levels. This is why frames of reference, the choice of instruments, the jargon employed in the domain, the distribution of responsibilities and, more broadly, the logic of public action are influenced largely by the French model. Other quasi-public institutions, such as consular chambers, help address waste management issues at the national level. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI), for example, produces assessments of industrial waste generation and exportation, thereby helping to quantify the metabolic fluxes generated by the sum of the archipelago’s economic activities.

These forms of government intervention – assisting public and private actors with financing and information-sharing – structure the waste management system in decisive ways. They reveal an effort to guide and frame the system by assisting in the smooth and uniform operation of the regulatory production process at the provincial level. Lastly, they attest to the existence of a de facto national policy programme.

4 Devising an Autonomous Pathway for the Future of Waste Governance

We have shown how the modes and levels of waste governance have rapidly evolved in New Caledonia and how European models have influenced them. Nonetheless, the question remains whether these methods, especially if only marginally adapted to the local reality, can contribute to New Caledonia’s waste management improvement. We believe that these management models tend to neglect specific issues unique to New Caledonia, which we will discuss. These factors should also be taken into account when issuing a call for future research.

4.1 Better Understanding Social Practices and Waste Practices

The social norms regarding waste and waste materials in New Caledonia, briefly mentioned above, remain poorly documented. Research in discard studies has established that waste is a relational reality: one person’s waste is another’s resource. This does not translate into New Caledonia’s regulations and technical practices, which tend to ignore the complex social practices surrounding waste for the local population. As a consequence, they suggest a uniformly gloomy waste situation in Kanak communities and in the rural and island municipalities that tend to have the highest percentages of Kanak populations (Belep, Île des Pins, Ouvéa, Lifou, Houaïlou, Poya and so on).

New Caledonia is characterised by a culture of scarcity. This is partly due to it being an archipelago and partly to the impoverishment of a segment of its population, the effects of which are visible right across the territory. In reality, this culture governs the possibility of implementing sensible waste policies. There are seemingly endless examples of this, and we will consider but a few. The fact that New Caledonia is an island territory distant from part of the international exchange of goods means that spare parts for the repair and maintenance of technical objects are often lacking. One way to deal with this is to conserve anything that could potentially serve as a spare part. This applies to all kinds of manufactured products, especially more expensive ones, such as vehicles. The result of this double shortage is that the landscape is peppered with scrap vehicles. It can also lead to conflict when technicians attempt to remove these objects, which they consider to be sources of chemical pollution as well as health challenges (they serve as mosquito nests) and visual hazards. Such conflicts exemplify conflicting conceptions of waste. On the one hand, there are practices that reflect a socioeconomic reality in which all objects are potentially useful; on the other hand, there is an environmental technical logic according to which every object must be in its rightful place.

Implicitly, these are items absent from both waste collection and household spaces because they are reused despite the risks associated with them. Even though plastic packaging is ubiquitous in consumer goods, it is absent from waste collection in tribal regions. However, a part of this packaging gets reused. Plastic bottles are used as ice packs in freezers, which the materially poor use to conserve food from hunting, fishing and gardening. Other types of packaging are used to start and maintain domestic and agricultural fires: for example, tyres are used in crop burning on wild yam [bambounias] plantations. Plastic in all forms is highly appreciated in the rainy season, but it is flammable in all conditions. Although technicians generally encourage reuse practices, they condemn burning because of the health and environmental impacts. The technicians’ response is partly aimed at spreading awareness of the dangers of such practices for oneself and one’s family. However, because this response is not a long-term solution to resource shortages, provinces and municipalities are looking for other options. The North Province is currently considering making impounds open to the public so that people can salvage items that have been adequately treated against pollution and will not serve as a breeding ground for mosquitos.

These examples demonstrate a purely technical approach to waste, which does not account for the variety of longstanding local practices and is destined to present entirely logical practices as irrational or retrograde behaviours.

4.2 Re-politicising Waste Governance

These questions are significant because contemporary waste governance in New Caledonia is marked by a technical, modernising rationality that is presented as apolitical. It informs the normalisation process occurring in waste management, visible in the relationship between New Caledonia and metropolitan France. France imposes a management model on New Caledonia through technical and organisation engineering. Infrastructural solutions (such as landfills and civic amenity sites) and institutional and financial ones (like inter-municipality associations and recycling chains) are very similar to the French model, including the words used to qualify the various infrastructures and services. This kind of normalisation process occurs within New Caledonia as well: the policies of the South Province not only generate momentum with respect to the other provinces but also provide a normative framework for them. Although these normalisation practices are not inherently problematic, they perpetuate forms of domination – such as through technical expertise. They also naturalise waste management practices. At the same time, certain assumed norms are not questioned. In the following, we discuss two examples.

First, actors in waste management systematically distinguish between consumption and waste, as though they were not fundamentally connected. Is all consumption of food, electronic goods, etc. legitimate in New Caledonia? Is all its waste ethically justifiable? These questions are not posed, even though the import economy makes it possible for the territory to be very selective regarding the products it chooses to import. This has resulted in a preference for generic instruments that have framing effects on the management and social existence of wastes. These instruments are always “end-of-pipe” solutions, which do not address the issue of prevention. In these solutions, waste is presented as a certainty to be addressed using technical fixes.

As for the second example, the focus on household waste overlooks the enormous amount of residual waste generated by nickel mining and processing, which is relatively absent from the public debate. It is widely known that nickel scoria has been and continues to be used in levelling and landscaping work. Nouméa is largely built on these vast expanses of waste, which have been used to extend land into the ocean and to fill in mangroves. Nevertheless, this fact rarely features in public debate, just like any discussion of mining waste itself. This is not to mention that these materials are hazardous but merely to express surprise at the lack of a debate about them.

This surprise is probably timely. There is reason to believe that the politics of waste are changing in the context of the broader debate over New Caledonia’s future. For example, in 2019, the Congress of New Caledonia passed a law intended to prohibit various plastic products from being brought to market. Among those prohibited from being produced or imported are plastic bags, disposable tableware, cotton swabs and takeout food trays. This law points to the tension between consumption and environmental protection. Images of turtles wounded by plastic straws, or fish that have suffocated after mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, have done much, even at the margins, to focus political discussions on waste, both in New Caledonia and the South Pacific more broadly.

4.3 Waste Beyond the Borders of New Caledonia

The consideration given to plastics at the regional level demonstrates, for the first time, an agreement on the issue of waste. Above all, it repositions the issue beyond the borders of New Caledonia and, more broadly, in the Pacific.

Regional cooperation in the South Pacific has generated reflection on the issue of waste, which is a common point of concern among the islands of Oceania. Since the quantity of residuals (mainly plastic) first rang alarm bells washing up on their coastlines and by the problems resulting from cruise tourism, island territories have grown increasingly concerned about the issue of waste (Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility 2018). All of these territories face the conundrum of coping with residual materials produced from modern modes of consumption and having difficulty reclaiming and recycling secondary materials because the small amounts produced pose a barrier to their integration in recycling chains. The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the main intergovernmental organisation for environmental cooperation in the Pacific Islands region, has begun to include – in addition to the issues of biodiversity, climate change and pollution – the issue of waste on its agenda. SPREP’s Clean Pacific Roundtable, held in Suva in 2016 and Fiji in 2018, is set to take place in New Caledonia in 2020. The organisation of this roundtable indicates that waste is being recognised as a subject of regional interest that calls for new forms of cooperation and intervention. SPREP works to finance action plans on hazardous waste – the PacWaste Project (Pacific Hazardous Waste Management Programme) and PacWastePlus – and to adopt strategic management frameworks, such as Cleaner Pacific 2025. In addition, SPREP pushes countries in the Pacific Islands region to ratify the Basel and Waigani Conventions, thereby taking on a governance role and working with countries to solidify a regional waste regulatory framework.

New Caledonia occupies a somewhat paradoxical position in this context. We have discussed the fact that the territory is not able to manage its waste locally. Hazardous waste is shipped to Australia and New Zealand, and there are challenges to integrating reusables in the globalised recycling economy. Secure waste management and recycling thus play out in part beyond New Caledonia’s borders. The circular economy cannot be entirely conceptualised at the territory scale as restricted as that of New Caledonia. Instead, it must consider itself within the context of a globalised waste system structured by the large Asian (Chinese and Japanese) and Oceanian economies.

In comparison with the region’s other countries (not including New Zealand and Australia), New Caledonia’s waste management is considered technically sophisticated and marked by French expertise and technical and institutional engineering. At the same time, however, its attachment to France (with a particular legal status and governance, language barriers and a higher level of wealth) distances the country from regional organisations. For example, as a French territory, New Caledonia is not eligible for ACP (Organisation of African, Caribbean and the Pacific States) financing from the European Union nor can it participate in the Cleaner Pacific 2025 programme. Thus, New Caledonia is confronted with broader issues related to the problems posed by its political status for its ability to develop strong regional agreements.

5 Conclusion

Our analysis of waste governance in New Caledonia is not exhaustive, but specific points have been clearly established. Waste management is a multi-tiered process that involves multiple levels of power. It is essentially the provinces and municipalities and their affiliated groups that bear primary responsibility for waste management. The importance of the territorial level cannot be overstated in two ways. It organises environmental and pollution policy, resulting in the creation of a de facto national environmental policy.

In New Caledonia, waste management is still characterised by a lack of consistency at all levels of government. Is the time suitable for developing the “right” degree of governance to handle waste or making recommendations to improve waste management, planning and coordination of regulation? Analysing governance responsibilities reveals that waste concerns are frequently addressed and defined by default in the context of health, pollution or international law, particularly when it comes to hazardous waste. To solve this, perhaps the objective should be better to understand waste’s social presence in New Caledonia, define it openly and establish ethical and innovative management methods. To do so, we must first have a deeper understanding of the forces at work in what is said or kept unsaid regarding garbage in New Caledonia, and then utilise that understanding to uncover the social, political and economic mechanisms that would otherwise remain concealed.