Rocks out, waste in: A double penalty in gravel-rich river valleys?

Abstract

Construction and Demolition (C&D) waste is the largest solid waste stream in France, yet circular economy (CE) research on this sector tends to privilege technical and quantitative framings over its socio-economic and governance dimensions. This article examines the implementation of CE measures in the gravel-quarrying industry of the Basse-Ariège plain (Occitanie, France), where alluvial aggregates are extracted from the water table and the resulting pits are backfilled with C&D waste legally classified as "inert." Drawing on Discard Studies and territorial political ecology, and building on a two-year interdisciplinary and participatory research project (NAPALAIR) combining documentary analysis, 53 semi-structured interviews, and participatory workshops with residents, farmers, quarry operators, and public authorities, we ask who gains and who pays from CE implementation. Our results show that extraction and disposal are structurally coupled through a profitable "double freight" logistics arrangement, and that backfilling is classified as "recovery" through a permissive legal and regulatory regime shaped largely by industry actors themselves. We further show that current leaching standards fail to capture how submersion in groundwater may alter the degradation kinetics of supposedly inert materials. Rather than curbing extraction, CE targets make quarrying more economically viable, producing what we term a double penalty for the host territory: fertile agricultural land is lost to extraction, then exposed to long-term contamination risk from buried waste, while local municipalities receive only marginal economic benefits. We argue that this extraction-discard coupling is not unique to Ariège, offering scope conditions relevant to CE-driven extractivism in comparable resource-rich, waste receiving territories.