Gestion des déchets, recyclage et qualité de l’emploi

Waste management is central in the process of ecological transition: studying this sector is therefore especially useful to understand the challenges at play. Focusing on employment, this article applies data mining to Insee sectoral statistics (Esane and Alisse) in order to conduct a comparative analysis, over the 2010 decade, of various waste management activities. We consider more specifically two activities with opposite ecological implications: the treatment and disposal industry (landfilling or incineration, brown mode) and the materials recovery and recycling industry (green mode). Despite public interventions in favour of the latter, it exhibited a lower quality of employment until 2015. This was probably due to economies of scale benefiting the treatment-disposal as compared to the recovery-recycling industry. Those economies of scale improved labour productivity and capital returns and encouraged investment by profit-oriented operators. Over the 2010 decade, while both activities shared a slow-paced employment growth, the treatment-disposal industry concentrated its wage bill on skilled workers and technicians, in connection with efforts to equip the sector for energy production. Our study therefore brings to the fore the role of equipment investment explaining the employment quality gap between the treatment-disposal brown industry on the one hand and the recycling green industry on the other hand.