Arnaud Gissinger

Clothing banks look free but are secretly funded by selling the reusable fraction, mostly exported. When export demand collapsed and ultra-fast-fashion flooded banks with unsellable items, each container flipped to a loss — causing operators to quietly withdraw, ending the servic

Dense, low-canopy, dark-surfaced neighborhoods run several degrees hotter than nearby areas during heatwaves, concentrating health risk and energy costs — and the burden falls hardest on low-income districts least able to adapt.

Specific streets and low points flood repeatedly in heavy rain — from clogged drains or drainage never sized for today's storm intensity — causing recurring property damage and access hazards that stay below the threshold for major capital fixes.

In heatwaves, cold snaps and outages, isolated elderly, mobility-limited, and medically dependent residents are often invisible to neighbors and services — so danger is found only after a missed check-in, while privacy concerns make a naive registry its own hazard.

Organic food waste is roughly a third of household residual waste. Collected mixed with general waste it is heavy, wet, and expensive to truck and incinerate. France made household biowaste sorting mandatory in 2024 — but curbside collection adds its own routes, bins and treatme…

Across tropical forest nations, most clearing is illegal and tied to cattle, soy/palm, land-grabbing, and mining. It is profitable, remote, hard to police, and weakly enforced when political will lapses — progress is real but reversible.

Coastal, island, and remote communities sit beside seawater but lack safe drinking water. Conventional desalination (RO, thermal) requires reliable power, capital, trained technicians, and supply chains they don't have — and discharges brine that harms local ecosystems.

Shampoo, conditioner, body wash and liquid soap are overwhelmingly packaged in single-use plastic bottles that are rarely recycled. The format persists because plastic is cheap, light, unbreakable and water-resistant, and supply chains are built around it — no alternative yet be…

Knowledge of which civic interventions actually work is scattered across PDFs, news clippings, council minutes and individual experts' heads. A community facing a problem another community already solved has no practical way to find that — so it re-invents the approach, and ofte…

A platform that structures civic problem-solving as a shared graph: issues break into sub-issues, each issue collects multiple competing solutions, and every solution accumulates case studies with structured outcomes, costs and metrics. Semantic search, voting and contributor tr…

Have municipalities procure textile collection as a paid service (service contract or per-tonne gate fee), like glass or biowaste, so the operator is paid to collect and divert tonnage and resale revenue just lowers the price — moving commodity risk from the fragile operator to t

A central facility fills durable standardised containers to order, labelled per household; a carrier delivers full units and collects empties on the same stop for central cleaning and refill. Filling only on order kills the contamination window; the doorstep swap removes dispens…

Set the EPR support per tonne to the measured end-to-end cost of collecting, sorting, and disposing of textiles, indexed to rise automatically when resale revenue falls — so collection is a cost-recovered public service funded by producers, not a bet on the export price.

Scale the EPR fee by recyclability (bonus for durable mono-fibre garments, malus for disposable blends) and add a per-item levy on ultra-fast-fashion volume. This funds reject processing and pushes producers to design for sortability — shrinking the unsellable fraction at source.

Instead of giving hens to individual households, install a shared coop serving many households or an institution (school, retirement home). Residents bring food scraps; a rota or staff care for the hens; eggs are shared. Reaches gardenless households and spreads the care burden…

Attack the economics, not just the act: zero-deforestation buyer agreements (Soy Moratorium, G4 cattle agreement), conditioning subsidised rural credit on environmental compliance, a property-level registry (CAR), and blacklisting the worst-offending municipalities to restrict t…

Upgrade trusted existing community buildings with solar and battery storage so they stay powered during outages and serve as dependable heating/cooling refuges. Gives at-risk residents a known fallback that doesn't depend on being checked on.

A shipping-container RO plant powered by solar PV and battery storage, producing ~75,000 L/day for ~25,000–35,000 people, operated by trained local staff and partly funded through water sales. Capital cost ~US$0.5–0.57M; ~20-year service life.

Install rain gardens, permeable surfaces and other sustainable drainage (SuDS) across the catchment to soak up rainfall where it lands, cutting peak runoff to overwhelmed drains. Most effective as a dispersed, upstream-weighted network.

Form a standing community Flood Action Group — backed by a flood charity — to systematically log flood hotspots, sustain engagement between events, and act as one coordinated voice to the councils and water companies that otherwise diffuse responsibility.

The municipality does not distribute hens. Instead it subsidises hen coops (a rebate) and runs free chicken-keeping classes, so residents keep their own backyard hens that eat food scraps. Removes the authority's animal-welfare liability; fits places where keeping hens is alread…

A municipality buys laying hens from regional breeders and distributes them — free or heavily subsidised — to households with garden space that register. The hens eat kitchen scraps, diverting biowaste at source, and give households eggs in return. Run as a complement to curbsid…

Launch refill in hotels and multi-unit residential buildings before going direct-to-consumer. These settings give free route density (many units per address), a rational B2B buyer instead of fragile consumer goodwill, contract-based predictable demand, and a cheap place to prove…

A direct-to-consumer refill service combining concentrate (no water shipped), fill-to-order labelled per household, ad-hoc orders batched against a cutoff so routes can collect empties, and a closed loop. Made durable by skipping the 30–50% retailer margin and by customer-retent…

Bind the individual measures together with a standing interministerial action plan (PPCDAm) covering land-use planning, monitoring and sustainable production, and fund it through a performance-based mechanism (the Amazon Fund) that pays out only after verified reductions, drawin…

A black-lined basin of saltwater under a sloped glass cover: sun evaporates the water, it condenses on the glass and runs off as distillate. No moving parts, no consumables, repairable with local materials — but output is ~4–6 L/m²/day, so area demand is the binding constraint.

Sell shampoo/soap as a concentrated liquid (or tablet/powder) that the customer dilutes with tap water at home. Removes most of the shipping weight and volume while keeping the product a liquid the customer already knows — preserving brand control over the final formula.

Plant and steward trees, prioritizing the specific streets that heat-mapping shows are hottest and have least canopy. Trees cut surface and air temperature through shade and evapotranspiration, and also reduce stormwater runoff.

Reintroduce passive cooling from traditional hot-climate design — shaded streets, courtyards, underground air channels — and pair it with heat governance: naming and categorizing heatwaves so the public treats heat as seriously as storms.

Pair two-tier satellite monitoring (an annual census plus near-real-time alerts, ideally radar where clouds are heavy, published openly) with a funded, empowered enforcement body that acts on the alerts: targeted inspections, fines, embargoes, and seizure/destruction of clearing…

Replace dark, heat-absorbing roofs and pavement with high-albedo reflective surfaces — cool roofs, light-colored or coated pavement — to reflect sunlight rather than retain it. Acts fast and scales through building codes and repaving cycles.

Replace volunteer committees with a professional maintenance company on a performance contract: hotline, guaranteed repair times (~3 days), preventive maintenance, and a stocked parts supply chain — funded by pooled mobile-money subscriptions and results-based payments tied to up

Where coastal advection fog is dependable, vertical mesh nets passively strain water droplets from wind-driven fog into reservoirs — no energy, no membranes, no seawater intake. Cheap and low-tech, but geographically constrained and historically prone to social/ownership collapse

A femtosecond-laser-textured aluminium panel wicks seawater uphill across its face, absorbs ~92% of sunlight to evaporate it, and uses the coffee-ring effect plus salt creeping to push crystallised salt to the panel edges — self-cleaning, no membranes, no chemicals, no electricit