Marseille has hired private companies to pick up trash two weeks into a strike by garbage collectors that has left the city with overflowing bins, rats running through piles of waste and rubbish being blown into the sea.
A third strike in four months by the garbage workers means Marseille faces a repeat of an environmental disaster during a strike in October, when torrential rains washed tonnes of uncollected garbage on to the beaches and into the Mediterranean.
Some citizens are setting the trash on fire in protest against the authorities.
"Everything is in place to push us towards a security and environmental drama," Marseille mayor Benoit Payan said in a statement on Monday.
By hiring private firms, the socialist mayor is circumventing the conservative-run Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolitan authority, which runs regional waste collection.
But French media reported that only a few tonnes of waste had been collected by private firms so far, with thousands of tonnes of garbage still on the streets of France's second-biggest city.
"There is trash everywhere, and the trash that flies away will end up directly in the sea," said Alexandre Mounier, head of the "1 dechet par jour" (One piece of rubbish a day), an environmental volunteer group.
He called on people to keep trash indoors for now or to at least put it into closed bins, so it is not blown out to sea.
In the past decade, Marseille has been hit by garbage collectors' strikes nearly every year, with much of the conflict focused on metropolitan authorities' attempts to end the decades-old "fini-parti" (finished-gone) system under which staff can end their shift when they consider their work done.
A regional audit body has estimated that under this system, Marseilles' refuse collectors worked only about 3.5 hours a day.
In December, a majority of the unions agreed to end "fini-parti" in exchange for financial compensation but the left-wing Force Ouvriere union has contested the deal and its members are preventing garbage trucks from leaving the collection centres, French media reported.
Marseille Force Ouvriere head Patrick Rué told reporters for French media on Tuesday that the strike will continue as talks are deadlocked.
(Reporting by Marc Leras; writing by Geert De Clercq. Editing by Jane Merriman)
