"Protecting the sea is an obsession": Cannes installs anti-litter baskets to prevent rubbish from ending up in the sea

This is not a manhole. "It's a rainwater collector," the mayor of Cannes and president of the Cannes Lérins urban area, David Lisnard, rightly points out to a small gathering around a plaque. This is an important distinction, because it is at the level of the Croisette on the east side, for the most part, that waste abandoned on the ground reaches the sea once carried by the rain. This is also where part of the environmental policy led by the urban area through the "Quality of Marine Environments" commission is at stake.

On Friday, May 30, the latter inaugurated the installation of forty-two anti-waste baskets around the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, along a 450-meter stretch. At the bottom of the drain, the device, just installed by the partner company Pollustock, already has a mouthful of rubbish: cigarette butts, food paper, etc. "With hundreds of thousands of passages each year, it seemed necessary to focus on this sector, the epicenter of the events," explains Françoise Bruneteaux, deputy in charge of the environment and sustainable development.

Put an end to the "bad buzz"

Especially since, so close to the sea – or even right above it – "the runoff water in this location did not benefit from upstream filtering," admits David Lisnard. As a result, the macro-waste ended up at the outlets, then in the Mediterranean. Laurent Lombard, a diver and president of the association Opération Mer Propre, still remembers his shocking video. It surely sparked an accelerated awareness among elected officials. In 2015, he filmed the seabed of the Bay of Cannes littered with waste and posted the images on social media. Within 24 hours, the video had been viewed nearly 300,000 times. "Ten years after this bad buzz, the difference is enormous ," he says happily. "Before, I was taking more than a thousand cans out of the outlets; today, we're closer to a hundred, or even fifty. The improvement is undeniable, even if problems persist."

At a cost of around 500 euros per 30-litre basket – not including regular maintenance and the level detector, designed to prevent blockages – these are "significant" investments that Cannes Lérins is allowing itself. "The environment is a priority cause, so important that it deserves neither hype nor hypocritical posturing ," says the president. "Protecting the Mediterranean has been a long-standing obsession of mine." An "obsession" that should continue with the installation of future baskets "all along the Croisette" .

An operation in continuity

In Cannes, several waste recovery systems have been installed by the urban area since 2020: recovery nets have been installed at the ferry terminal, on an outfall at the exit of the Poussiat valley, at Port-Canto, and in the Foux valley. In terms of urban amenities, twenty-one baskets were installed on Place Gambetta in April 2024, making a total of sixty-six baskets, including the recent installations on the forecourt of the Palais des Festivals.