The French mayor collects the dumped waste and throws it in the house of the culprits

A mayor of a small town in eastern France has become the latest to return illegally thrown waste to his owner and to deposit waste dumped in the garden of the culprits.

Jean-Pierre Dessein took action after being exasperated by the waste dumped illegally in the streets and surroundings.

In an attempt to teach the perpetrators – and others – a lesson, he filmed himself “returning” about a dozen pieces of wood that the culprits had unlawfully thrown away. The video was then posted on Facebook.

He said: “We warned people. Take note, offenders: if you are identified, it will be “returned to sender”! “

Mr Dessein told BFMTV that the fly spill was noticed by two city workers while jogging in the area. They saw a couple drop wooden planks next to a buried container that had recently been put in place by the commune, he said.

He added: “My employees saw with their own eyes who had dropped these boards, and they immediately called me, because this is not a new problem in this commune.

Mr. Dessein declared having visited the house of the authors in Art-sur-Meurthe, in Meurthe-et-Moselle (Grand Est) and asked to speak with the couple but that nobody “deigned to answer”.

He said: “So I took the boards, I asked my employees to film it for proof, and before anyone accuses us of damaging the items, we just sent them back to the sender. . “

The mayor said the couple then reacted swiftly and accepted the garbage as theirs, but said they were unaware they weren’t allowed to dump it where they did.

But Mr. Dessein replied, “I don’t want to hear it. I have been warning people for months, especially in this neighborhood, of this problem. Usually, we regularly find all kinds of rubbish in our streets: tires, furniture, cardboard boxes, construction rubble, etc.

“Last week I was angry because we found a paint bucket upside down on a sidewalk… there was paint everywhere. We are only a small municipality of barely 1,700 inhabitants, and we only have two municipal agents. If they’re wasting their time scraping paint off the floor, there’s nothing else they can do.

He said that so far the council had focused on educating people, but the last problem was “too many”, especially since the nearest landfill is only 6 minutes away. km from town.

He finished: “There is no excuse. People should know that I will no longer hesitate to use these drastic methods.

Mayors take major action against illegal waste

Mr Dessein is not the only mayor to have taken strong action against fly spills and illegal dumping of waste in recent years.

Last year, the mayor of Laigneville in Oise (Hauts-de-France), Christophe Dietrich, posted on Facebook a video of 10 tons of rubbish scattered over a field, including bed frames, plastic seats , metal frames, armchairs, wooden doors, door frames, mattresses and sofas.

After identifying the culprits because of the video surveillance, Dietrich added that the waste would be “returned to the sender at home”, less than 48 hours after being landfilled.

Five vans full of garbage went to the people’s homes and threw the garbage outside, to punish the perpetrator and force them to dispose of the contents responsibly.

In 2019, Arnaud Lécuyer, mayor of Saint-Pôtan in the Côtes-d’Armor, gets angry at a pile of garbage thrown anonymously in the city center, and decides to investigate the author.

Writing on Twitter, Mr Lécuyer said that a local address was visible among the pile of boxes, gift wrap, leftover food and other household waste, prompting the mayor to return the trash to its rightful owners.

In a letter accompanying the return, Mr. Lécuyer attached a photo of the waste, and wrote: “This holiday season, I guess those boxes, wrapping paper and leftover food fell off Santa’s sleigh so that he was leaving your house.

“To help right his mistake, I thought it would be helpful to bring them back to you.”

And in September 2018, Denis Rapinel, mayor of the municipality of Ille-et-Vilaine Mont-Saint-Michel, returned a huge pile of household garbage to a local resident after finding it dumped in the countryside.

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