Case study of
#00049 Fund collection through cost-indexed EPR support, decoupled from the resale price
Hautes-Pyrénées (Vic-en-Bigorre), France
#00044
Implementer
Le Relais / Récup Action (Vic-en-Bigorre)
Timeline
Since Jul 15, 2025
Location
Description
On 15 July 2025 Le Relais suspended collection across its national network of roughly 22,000 containers — about 70% of France's used-clothing collection — in a funding standoff with the eco-organisme Refashion. The Hautes-Pyrénées was one of the territories that went dark that day, with the Le Relais site at Vic-en-Bigorre and its local partner Récup Action directly affected.
Refashion was paying €156/tonne while Le Relais put its real net treatment cost at €304/tonne; an emergency offer of €192/tonne was rejected as still far short. Around 70 insertion-through-work jobs in the department were put at risk. Local authorities asked residents to stop depositing textiles to avoid fly-tipping around sealed containers.
Collection resumed in late July/August after a state-backed package lifted support toward €223/tonne. The structural €156→€304 gap that caused the suspension was not durably resolved at the time.
Metrics
5Funding
Lessons learned
- The suspension was synchronised and national: one operator carrying ~70% of collection can darken a whole department in a single day, leaving local authorities with no independent lever to reopen service.
- The cause was a quantified per-tonne deficit (€156 paid vs ~€304 cost), making this a funding-calibration failure, not a logistics one — directly illustrating the need for cost-indexed EPR support.
- The social-insertion jobs attached to collection are first-order stakes: ~70 posts in one department alone were put at risk when the operator withdrew.
- Reopening required a national political rescue (state-backed package), confirming that territories cannot substitute locally once a national operator withdraws.
Sources
2Documented Jun 7, 2026