How European plastic waste invaded Turkey

A man at a plastic waste recycling plant in Kartepe in Kocaeli province.

May 11, 2022. AFP - OZAN KOSE

Text by: Anne Andlauer

3 mins

Whether consumed in Paris, London or Rome, a plastic bottle has a good chance of ending its life in Turkey.

If Asian countries, such as China, now refuse to be the garbage cans of Western countries, Turkey imports them massively.

On site, environmental activists denounce the proliferation of wild dumps, but also that of fires in recycling plants.

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From our correspondent in Istanbul,

Does Turkey import this waste to recycle it, and thus create raw materials useful to its economy.

It is a lucrative business.

According to the Association of Turkish Recyclers (Gekader), in 2020, Turkey would have imported $128 million worth of plastic waste and exported the equivalent of $1.2 billion worth of recycled plastic products.

What has changed since early 2018 is that major Asian importers,

starting with China

, have stopped buying most recyclable waste.

43,000 tonnes of waste imported per month

European countries have thus turned to Turkey, which has increased the volume of its imports.

And the numbers are impressive.

Last year, Turkey imported around 43,000 tonnes of waste per month, compared to just 4,000 tonnes before 2018. The country has become 

Europe's largest importer of plastic waste

.

This waste is in addition to the 4 to 6 million tonnes generated each year by 84 million Turks.

But not everything is recycled.

This translates into packaging from a French frozen food giant or sachets from a British supermarket chain lying in wild dumps, regularly discovered by environmental NGOs.

The number of fires at recycling plants is exploding

The NGO Greenpeace thus denounces summary controls at the borders and inside the country.

It often happens that imported plastics are ultimately not recyclable, or that recycling companies, which work under license from the authorities, do not ultimately have the means to recycle everything they import.

There are also businesses that operate illegally, some of which have been shut down in recent years.

But it's not just fly tipping, as the number of fires at plastic recycling factories is exploding.

Last year, fires in plastic waste reprocessing centers took place every three days: from 33 in 2019, they rose to 65 in 2020 and 121 in 2021, according to the count of Sedat Gündogdu, specialist in plastic pollution at Çukurova University in Adana, which observes that most fires start at night.

According to experts and environmental activists, some companies may have found an inexpensive way to dispose of non-recyclable waste, which would normally have to be sent to incineration plants.

Lack of political will

Faced with this phenomenon, the authorities have decided to react.

Since October 2021, a regulation provides for the withdrawal of its operating authorization from any company in the sector found guilty of arson.

But the authorities lack the means to carry out checks and, above all, the political will to curb these massive imports of European waste.

Faced with the outcry caused by the publication of images of wild dumps, Turkey had decreed in May 2021 a ban on the import of plastic waste.

Before lifting the ban a week after it came into force two months later.

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  • Turkey

  • Environment