Vendée department, France

What was done

Trivalis, the departmental household-waste authority for the Vendée (France), ran a hen-and-coop distribution as one tool in a decade-long waste-prevention strategy, explicitly tied to a national target of cutting household waste 10% by 2020.

After a pilot judged conclusive on 37 households in 2013, the operation was scaled up: in 2014, 1,200 hens and 600 coops were distributed to ~600 households (two hens per household, two households per commune) across the department, working through 22 local authorities covering the Vendée's 282 communes. Hens were supplied by Antigny Nutrition, a regional traditional-poultry business. Notably, Trivalis supplied the coop as well as the hens — removing the build-it-yourself barrier.

By around 2017, 929 individual or collective coops were in place across the department (homes, retirement homes, schools).

Context and results

• Trivalis frames the hens as deliberate "relay" households — visible local examples meant to spread the practice and raise wider awareness, especially among children, rather than as the diversion mechanism in itself.
• It is one strand of a broad prevention programme: the Vendée also distributed over 100,000 individual composters. Over the period, the department's residual ("grey bin") waste fell by 93 kg per person.
• The hen operation's specific tonnage is not isolated from that overall figure — its role is partly demonstrative.

What a replicating authority should know

• Supplying the coop, not just the hens, removes the single biggest practical barrier to participation. Trivalis gave households a ready coop; many other programmes leave this to residents and lose applicants to it.
• Spread thin for demonstration effect. Two households per commune across 282 communes puts a visible example in nearly every village — useful if the goal is behaviour change, not just the tonnage from those specific households.
• Pilot first. A 37-household trial preceded the 600-household rollout.
• Treat hens as one strand of a prevention programme. In the Vendée the headline result (−93 kg/person residual waste) came from hens plus 100,000+ composters plus collective composting — the hen scheme is a complement, and its standalone tonnage was not separately isolated.