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From the beginnings of sorting and recycling to the circular economy, this interview offers the testimony of an activist on a little more than four decades of fight against waste. He looks back at the context of the mid-1970s when, as the punk motto No future appeared, ecology presented itself as an alternative to those economies that, communist or liberal, were pursuing the same goal: to produce more and more. In the wake of a “concrete ecologism,” Bruno Genty tells us about the creation of the “ Maison de la récupération”, both a prefiguration of future sorting centers and future “ ressourceries”, which will serve as a laboratory and pilot site for the launch of Éco-emballages. He then returns to the elements that governed the refocusing of waste policy on the notion of prevention, in particular the limits encountered by selective sorting and the perverse effects of the slogan There is gold in your garbage used by industrial waste management groups. It is in this context that France Nature Environnement orga-nized a conference in Orléans in 1999 to discuss waste prevention, and that the White Book on Waste Prevention (2001) by Francis Chalot was published, a seminal work in the development of a prevention approach that aims to produce and consume less or better—in any case differently—by breaking down the barriers between waste prevention and a specialized and technical approach. The interview shows how activists, sometimes from the institutional and/or associative world, have played a crucial role in the involvement of local authorities in this notion of prevention.