This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and progress milestones from France — covering health, climate, social policy, science, and more. Each entry highlights concrete developments worth knowing about.
French water and waste group Veolia has opened what it says is Europe’s first recycling plant for solar panels as thousands of tonnes of ageing solar panels are set to reach the end of their life.
Renault will invest more than €1bn into four plants in France to increase its electric car production in the country.
“With storage we can smooth out the intermittence of renewable energy and guarantee the balancing of power grids,” EDF chief executive Jean-Bernard Levy told reporters.
ISA is an inter-governmental organization that aims to mobilize $1 trillion in funds for future solar generation, storage and technology across the world. It has 60 signatories, with 30 of those countries having ratified the agreement.
The 2021 goal sets a more aggressive target than the timeline advanced by Mr Macron’s predecessor, Francois Hollande, who sought to shut down the country’s coal-powered plants by 2023.
The government said the proposed reforms will cut in half the average time it takes for wind power projects to be completed and connected to the French electricity grid.
France plans to terminate the granting oil and gas exploration licenses at home and in overseas territories, as the country aims to increase the share of renewables in the nation’s energy mix.
France’s plastic ban, passed in September 2016, made it the first country to outlaw single-use plastic plates, cups, and cutlery nationwide. The law gave producers until 2020 to switch to compostable, biosourced materials. Three years later, the EU followed with its own sweeping directive — a quiet French precedent becoming a continental norm.
The right to disconnect became French law in 2016, giving workers at companies with more than 50 employees formal protection to ignore emails after hours. It followed a government report on “info-obesity” and a survey finding a third of French workers were using devices for work every single day. A quiet but meaningful reframing of rest.
France’s green roof law, passed by Parliament in 2015, made the country one of the first to require new commercial buildings to top their roofs with either living vegetation or solar panels. The mandate was a compromise, narrower than activists hoped, but it turned ecological rooftop design from a nice idea into a national baseline.
