If we associate the perception of the environment with the age group, young people have a discourse that is based on a desire to protect the environment and to take concrete action, while improving waste management best practices.

The media may have helped raise awareness in this area. Conversely, the less young have a conception of the environment that is most often limited to their living environment, namely proximity to housing.

The differentiation is also done according to the family situation of the people questioned. For singles, people without children, this is an environment described in terms of pollution and nuisance and they also evoke the future while couples with child are more concerned about their living environment.

Defining waste management

Then, if we integrate the socio-professional category (managers and liberal professions) in the face of the perception of the environment, this leads to another type of response. They express the most planetary and environmental futuristic aspirations. On the other hand, inactive people have a conception of the environment that is limited to their living environment.

Finally, another differentiation occurs mainly according to the geographical location of the accommodation. Thus, the inhabitants of the city are more sensitive to notions of the future and the planet; the inhabitants of a peri-urban area most often approach the environment in terms of pollution, nuisances, dumpsters and landfills described in their daily lives by these endless traffic jams when they go to the workplace.

This analysis attempts to demonstrate that there are three approaches to the environment and that the conception of the environment, at a local geographic scale, remains influenced by the individual characteristics of the respondents and inhabitants and therefore varies by social affiliation, through level of study, place of residence, age and sex.

Avoiding ecological disasters

But, ecological disasters or problems related to the environment are practically excluded in the responses collected.

The future, in terms of concerns for future generations, is hardly mentioned by the majority of people. This perception of the environment may be due to the fact that very few people have been made aware of the fragile balance of the biosphere on a planetary scale, including the waste creation aspect.

The complex and concrete problems of their environment are not one of their priority and they do not engage them to face such complex questions where multiple parameters interfere.

The environment, from scholarly concepts, the environment comes from an old French word taking its origin from the french word environner used in the sense of turning, doing the tour (dictionary 1930).

In 1964, it was added to the dictionary and when the dictionary is taken, Le Petit Robert only gives two definitions of this term which are still very far from ecological concerns: action to surround; pregnant; surroundings of a place. These definitions revolve around the word outline. The first idea of ​​the word therefore simply groups together what surrounds an object, a phenomenon or an individual

The meaning of the word supported by the Grand Larousse dictionary of the French language goes as follows:

• what surrounds, what constitutes the neighborhood;
• the usual entourage of a person, environment in which they live;
• all the natural and artificial elements that surround a human, animal or plant individual or a species.

For more than twenty years, this notion has been the subject of reflections reinforced by the media coverage of environmental concerns in reaction to occasional or accidental pollution and by this ecological awareness turned towards a desire to protect nature.

Consequently, the perception of the environment and its field of investigation have widened infinitely by integrating most disciplines.

In addition, it can be noted that this ecological awareness has been refined, the biological sciences have called the humanities; demography has found itself confronted with galloping global growth and overpopulations; sociology got involved, judging society to be unnatural and Western man domesticated.

Thus, the approach to this concept differs according to each discipline and each actor:

• Ecologists do it through the dynamics of living things;
• Engineers, technicians like Austin dumpster rentals and administrators by distinct physical environments (water, air, soil etc.…);
• Geographers through the concepts of space, territory, landscape;
• Sociologists through social movements;
• Philosophers by morality, ethics;
• Lawyers under the angle of legal constraint, regulations etc.