Waste, the invisible data that weighs on the rating

For a long time, waste was treated as a trivial, secondary, and sometimes troublesome externality. Today, it has become a strategic factor. In a context where CSR performance is becoming a criterion for financial valuation, the way a company manages, measures, and reports its waste is becoming a sign of seriousness, rigor, and commitment.

The CSRD directive, which came into force in 2024, now requires non-financial reporting with almost accounting-level precision. Yet, 90% of companies continue to report their waste based on estimates. They work by approximate tonnage, including margins of error, often far from the reality of flows. However, in the new landscape of compliance, ESG ratings, and investor pressure, vagueness no longer has a place.

To be considered in CSR rankings, you need to weigh to the nearest gram. Every cup, every box, every piece of waste has a weight, a density, and a trajectory. What was yesterday's waste has today become a marker of environmental performance, a competitive differentiator, and even a credibility asset for stakeholders.

We are entering the era of data-driven environmental realism. Refined data. Ultra-local. Verifiable. The rounded kilo is no longer popular. What matters is the exact gram, integrated into a traceability system capable of showing each company the true face of its waste. This is the price to pay to seriously manage its scope 3, avoid regulatory sanctions, optimize its non-financial rating, and gain the trust of the markets.

This detailed traceability also opens up a new angle of analysis: that of the end-of-life of materials. Knowing precisely what waste leaves your company means understanding the real impact you have on the final processing industrial ecosystem in France. In other words, what is your organization's contribution to the national circular economy? This visibility changes everything. It allows you to measure the flows reinjected into reuse or recycling channels, and to refine your carbon impact assessment. Because depending on the nature, destination, and recovery of the waste, carbon impacts can vary considerably. Having reliable, traceable, and verifiable data thus becomes a direct lever for managing your carbon footprint—an indicator that is now central to the strategies of committed groups.

Behind this requirement lies a broader challenge: repositioning waste as a lever for overall performance. Because it's no longer just about managing outgoing flows. It's about observing, analyzing, reducing, and anticipating. It's about making waste a strategic data source, a mirror of internal uses, and an indicator of transition.

This requires rethinking the entire environmental supply chain, from the point of production to treatment, including collection, sorting, and recovery. It also requires bringing together data professionals and waste professionals, engineers and logisticians, and CSR managers and field operators. In short, it requires moving beyond compartmentalized operations to embrace a collective intelligence approach capable of aligning operational objectives, environmental indicators, and responsible storytelling.

Waste is the shadow data that now influences markets. Understanding it better, tracking it better, and valuing it better creates a measurable competitive advantage. And in a world where reputation is sometimes worth more than profit, it's time for waste data to take its rightful place in corporate governance.

Tribune by Antoine Noblet, Sales Director of the Tri-O Greenwishes Group (LinkedIn).