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master thesis

Valorisation?! Transforming Lausanne’s Incinerator

Economidis, Leon
2025

Today, Switzerland is one of the world’s largest producers of waste per capita. Waste management has become a fully-fledged industry—one where cantons, municipalities, and private companies share a market driven by profit logics. This system relies primarily on incineration. Often presented as a model of efficiency, it is in fact a system designed not to question, but to accommodate the relentless transformation of resources into waste. In the canton of Vaud, the majority of waste is incinerated at Tridel. While perceived as a public service, it operates under market-driven principles. One pays to make waste disappear—energy recovery becomes profit, and profit eliminates the incentive to reimagine the system. This project seizes the impending technical overhaul of Tridel’s machinery as a critical moment of intervention. Through architectural transformation, it seeks to articulate a new narrative—one that interrupts the seamless disappearance of waste and instead fosters visibility, and accountability. The project envisions the incineration center not merely as a site of disposal, but as a place of encounter—between citizens, materials, infrastructures. The intervention respects the technical requirements of waste treatment while introducing new layers of meaning and use. The project engages with themes of visibility and invisibility, permanence and transformation, and the ethics of maintenance and decay. It proposes an infrastructure that is not hidden, but porous and legible—one that invites participation rather than exclusion.

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