Paris Notes November 2002

PARIS NOTES

November 2002

Volume 11 Issue 9

Like the many laborers—bakers, police officers, café waiters—who toil behind the scenes to keep the taken-for-granted aspects of this civilized city running, Natalie Guignon begins her day while most of Paris is still sleeping.

At 4:30am she rises, kisses her fiancé goodbye and takes a 5:30 bus from the suburb of Aubervilliers to Paris. Her destination is 20 Rue du Cloître-Saint-Merri (4th), where her atelier and team of 16 other "balayeurs" (and now "balayeuses") awaits.

Balayeuse is the feminine form of "street cleaner," in use around the shop ever since March 2002, when the 25-year-old Guignon was named one of two female pioneers allowed into the department's all-boys-club.

"I was really curious about what this work was like," the former city sanitation PR liaison says. "Some at the beginning didn't want women working at this," she continues, diplomatically, describing the deluge of media attention that surrounded her hiring. "The men had to adapt. Now they are content to have us. It's ‘calme'." Cloître-Saint-Merri was chosen as the test site. It's proven a success: now 10 women are on her team and 12 other trailblazers work down in the 14th.

Natalie's atelier is the HQ for a 12-acre street-sweeping region around the Pompidou Center and Les Halles, some of the most heavily trod patches of sidewalk in the city. The zone produces a serious mass of trash, most of which needs to be swept up before the rest of Paris sees it. Which is why Natalie normally begins her workday at 6am. Her "short" days end at 12:15pm, interspersed with grueling 11-hour shifts that last till 5pm.

Schedules differ each week so that each co-worker can share the dreaded weekend cleanup of Rue Saint-Denis. Her boss, Pierre Bracci, a genial, former sweeper himself, decides which of the 24 "secteurs" each cleaner will tackle for the day. Little foldable maps with highlighted borders show the trapezoidal plots that have been assigned. In Natalie's atelier, no one was looking forward to working the Sunday following the upcoming Technoparade.

Like her colleagues, Natalie usually works alone. But in the break room during the 8:30am "pause café," she can be found laughing, smoking cigarettes, listening to music and munching on Petits Ecoliers. Soon, though, someone in a trademark bright "green man" uniform hands out a ration of plastic bags. Break's over. Natalie checks her map: she already did her high-priority sector in the 4th arrondissement earlier that morning; now it's a long walk from the shop to a sector in the 1st near the old stock exchange. She saddles up her cart—essentially a metal garbage can, called a "roule-sac," with holders for her tools—and off she goes.

Natalie's first duties this morning are to sweep a classic little square called Place des Deux-Ecus (" Two Shields"), presently littered with leaves and chestnuts—a Sisyphean task in autumn. She then hits a circuit of streets beginning with Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. It's a loop that should keep her busy until lunchtime. The biggest boulevards in her sector are scoured by machines, while other sidewalks have already been hosed by little green hosing trucks called "lanciers." If she finishes early, she'll help a nearby colleague.

With a special tool, she opens a "bouche d'eau," a water spigot set into the sidewalk every few hundred meters. Using that enigmatic scrap of carpeting one sees in every Parisian gutter, she directs the gushing stream of water along the curb, and her work follows it. With methodical motions, she pushes sidewalk and street trash into the flow, moving with the water in a clockwise direction, brushing down Rousseau, turning right on Rue Saint-Honoré, making another right on Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs and ending at Rue du Pélican where it intersects with Rousseau.

Today’s sector is a nondescript piece of Paris, but when she’s sweeping it, each detail, each paving stone, each storefront, each forgotten bit of packaging seems to represent a story, an encounter, a loss. Her work reveals a microcosm of the city.

Sweeping one side of the street at a time, she works around parked cars—"a real problem"—and gathers all the stuff that pedestrians drop, drivers toss, businesses abandon. Cigarette butts, food wrappers, crumpled beer cans and the unmentionable detritus of daily (and doggie) life all flow into her river of trash, which ends up in Natalie's pushcart or deep in the Paris sewers. As you hear the steady, soothing swooshes of the broom moving through water, it's not hard to imagine other workers performing the same rhythmic but thankless task centuries ago.

By royal decree, medieval Parisians, accustomed to leaving their refuse in the street, were finally required to dump it outside the city walls. This, despite the first garbage can not appearing until March 7, 1884 (created by a certain Eugène Poubelle, the invention's French namesake). But oddly, the tools of the trade have not changed much over time: Natalie has her broom (called "le balai," once made of real broom plant, now green plastic), a dinged-up metal scooper on a pole ("la pelle") and a pair of gloves. The sole concession to modernity is the medical waste container Natalie uses to collect any syringes she might find.

Paris produces about 1.2 million tons of domestic garbage annually, double 1940 levels. Each day, it takes 7,800 people operating 915 vehicles to empty 24,000 garbage cans (mostly clear plastic sacs, now, for security reasons) and to deal with 18 tons of dog droppings and 3,300 tons of refuse. That averages to three pounds per person per day. Once it’s hauled away, 78 percent of all Parisian trash is burned, 15 percent is land filled and only 7 percent is recycled. Ever since French law required all communities to recycle by July 2002, participation in the program is fortunately growing. Every Paris address will be outfitted with recycling bins by the end of December 2002, prompting ambitious officials to set a goal of eventually recycling or composting half of all municipal trash.

Recycling won’t affect Natalie much, nor her colleagues, the rippers—garbage men (and men only) whose work has a dramatic effect on cleanliness as they make their rounds with noisy trucks each night. Meanwhile, the solitary street sweeper patiently pilots a channel of trash—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—picking up what’s left after the garbage trucks rumble away, cleaning up after all of us. Perhaps because Paris cleans itself so efficiently, residents will continue to use the streets as their waste bin.

Natalie's work is repetitive, and endless, but it still manages to please her. "Thanks to my job, I get to know the city well," she says. Seeing her official uniform, strangers ask her for directions. Someone asks if she knows anyone who's lost some keys. She often receives free cups of coffee and croissants from the shopkeepers she now waves to. A young boy, following her around for the morning, splashes through the gutter on his scooter. "Kids love to play in the water." Natalie quickly reminds him it's not fresh but comes from the Seine. "Don't drink it. It's dirty."

"I've always enjoyed being outside," Natalie says, finishing her circuit and shutting off the water. "I'm stronger than when I began. But I do miss my co-workers." With only a few months under her belt, Natalie is a real greenie. One man on her crew just retired after 39 years of street sweeping, a reminder that come rain or cold or gloom, street cleaning occurs every day of the year—except the workers' holiday of May 1.

"Back to the atelier. I have to eat." And Natalie Guignon wheels her cart back up the street.