These tissue decanted and dried in the Sun

It is already a little sea, water is salty, a diver out of the water bottle by hand and the farms of oysters are landscape with mussels. The étang de Thau, in the Hérault, knows, said, furious storms when the tramontane is insult. The seahorses, Blenny, wolves, gobies togetherstrains generously in Posidonia beds which surround the lagoon by a few metres from bottom. These exceptional environments, Florent Tarbouriech wished household them by expanding its small plant of treatment of oysters and mussels, asked about the strike of Marseillan. Family company, Médithau, neighbouring with the 600 shellfish of the pond, playing the card of sustainable production in recent years.

The company is one of the largest French providers with important retailers Carrefour (20 of its turnover), the string of specialized restoration Léon de Bruxelles, Casino, etc. It is under pressure from the first two that she has structured its environmental efforts, saying today among the best suppliers audited by Carrefour.

Florent Tarbouriech said that the most polluting this culture, by also ecological impact, waste accumulating on the strings which set the bivalves. Unlike the cultures of bouchot, the technique of submerged ropes of the bassin de Thau benefits not tides that discover and clean twice a day the farms. A multitude of parasitic organisms to develop and together with other materials, that ultimately interfere with the growth of the shell. Before the harvest, Médithau out therefore three to five times the strings up to its plant extracted waste. Natural, they are not pollutants in themselves, but their rejection at sea changes the transparency of the water and disrupts the lives of the Posidonia.

The impact of Médithau is all the more important that the company deals with much more than waste that its local cultures produce. On the 4,000 tons of shellfish which it markets each year, it produces on the étang de Thau as 500 tonnes of mussels and 500 tonnes of oysters. Depending on the season, the company is thus moulds of Italy, Greece or Spain arriving by truck, directly on their strings. Parties late morning, products reach the plant during the night. Treatments, partially manual and mechanical extract mussels their supporters and their waste, and then between them one by one. They then join the Ile-de-France Rungis platform reach their places of consumption, often located in the North. All these turns, generators of greenhouse, remains the main black shadow at the green table in the bivalve.

Médithau invested in waste treatment plant which is to sort the debris and then clean up prior to release, the enormous amount of water (300 m per hour) used in the separation process. The wash water is first screened to recover organic sludge. These tissue decanted and dried in the Sun. The producers of the pond were hosting a collection system of sludge by the Coved claimant, which resells them as agricultural amendment very limestone in the North of the France - remote recovery that does not Médithau. Wash water sifted is then sterilized ozone prior to discharge.

From Florent Tarbouriech, 99 of the producers of the lagoon reject their waters without treatment, while the Water Act is intended to regulate these practices.

Industrial still wants to make progress on several points. It seeks an economically viable outlet for the strings in polypropylene, for the time being thrown into landfill. According to the company, other industrial waste are recycled at 80, while they were not two years. Médithau including replaced its PVC packaging by polypropylene, more recyclable. He also works on the methanization of waste of shells and the transformation of its thousand tons of cement glue oyster shells. Jean-Jacques Theobald, Director of development, explains also seek to transform the byssus, these fibers that secrete mussels to grip their support (and that we abhor our plates). These developments will depend on the ability of the company funding. Medithau comes to invest 4 million in its plant these past three years, for a turnover of 8 million approximately.