Turkey said it would become a ‘zero waste’ nation. Instead, it became a dumping ground for Europe’s rubbish

On a chilly evening in late 2016, a few miles from the Turkish city of Adana, a Kurdish farmer named İzzettin Akman was sitting on the second-floor balcony of his concrete ranch house when a construction truck backed up to the edge of his citrus groves, paused, then dumped a great load of rubbish along the roadside. Before he pulled away, the truck’s driver set a paper bag on fire and tossed it on top of the garbage, triggering an outpouring of flames blacker than the night sky into which they ascended. Akman leapt up, put on his sandals and sprinted out along his dirt driveway toward the crackling trash pile.

The trash, by the time Akman got to it, was a hissing mass of fire. Plastic is less flammable than wood or paper, though it emits more heat as it burns. It is at least as capable as either of getting swept up in a gust of wind and, in Akman’s case, setting alight about 50 acres of orange and lemon trees. “Son of a bitch!” Akman wheeled around, ran back home, located a bucket, then rushed back to the conflagration, which he began dousing with water lifted out of a stream by the edge of the road.

Akman kept pouring. After about an hour, the flames started to dampen, then die, revealing a bed of thousands of half-incinerated fragments of garbage. Akman knelt down to examine the smouldering pile, turning over bits of candy wrappers and makeup containers with his fingers before being struck by something peculiar. The writing on the packaging wasn’t Kurdish. It wasn’t Turkish either. Akman kept clawing through the still-scalding plastic, looking for price labels. He found several. They were in euros and pounds.

For decades, Akman – a slim, middle-aged man with cheeks peppered by scraggly stubble – had, like generations of Akmans before him, made his living harvesting oranges and lemons and exporting them to Europe. Now Europe appeared to be sending its trash in the opposite direction, to the very edge of his citrus groves. Akman couldn’t help but be bemused by the occasional charred carton of juice jutting out of the pile. “That might have been made with my oranges,” he told me as we walked the edge of his farm, where, six years after its unceremonious dumping, the heap of garbage was now a lumpy mound of ash-cum-plastic.

A few weeks after the trash was dumped beside Akman’s property, the leaves of many of his citrus trees started turning yellow. Then their oranges and lemons began dropping to the ground. A year later, by which time Akman’s losses had brought his family to the brink of serious financial trouble, the trees bore no fruit at all. It turned out that a truckload of garbage set alight along the side of a citrus farm, even if it only burns for an hour or so, can be the catalyst of much longer-term damage. Days after the trash pile had been extinguished, it continued to let off smoke in all likelihood responsible for decimating the bee population that helps pollinate Akman’s citrus trees. And the innumerable pieces of half-melted plastic that had washed into the creek that provides water for Akman’s irrigation system had broken down into billions of microplastics and contaminants that circulated toward his groves before eventually getting sucked up into the trees themselves, crowding their roots like particles of fat in human arteries.

Akman’s farmhouse sits in south-eastern Turkey, about two hours’ drive from the Syrian border. It’s a stunning landscape: a lush plain across which snowmelt from the Taurus mountains trickles out toward the Mediterranean Sea shimmering to the south. The roads really do smell of fresh oranges, the rocky outcrops are ringed with medieval monasteries and ancient fortresses, and the land’s fertility has been legendary for as long as anyone can remember. For good reason it was here, of all possible places, that humanity is believed to have first made the shift from so many tens of thousands of years of a wandering, nomadic existence to a settled, agricultural one.

By the time I met Akman, his orange and lemon trees had begun to recover. But the land around Adana had not. The several tonnes of trash that had been dumped along the edge of his farm was, it turned out, no one-off. It was the start of something larger, more organised and more sinister to come.

Since the mass rollout of plastics at trade fairs and expos in the 1940s, plastic had been marketed to the public as a material that would slip from sight as soon as the consumer had decided they were done with it. Manufactured from the chemical by-products of hydrocarbon refining, plastic has two advantages. It is scandalously cheap to produce, for its building blocks result from the production of energy itself. And it is extremely convenient to use.

Yet plastic also comes at an unsustainable environmental cost, amounting to a ticking planetary timebomb in which objects that are used for seconds require nearly geological timescales to break down. Be it a lawn chair or a takeaway carton, the fate of the 9bn tonnes of plastic that humans have discarded since 1950 is much the same. It all still exists somewhere in some form. Much of it will spend thousands of years disintegrating into a near-infinite number of tiny pieces and contaminants, the devastating impact of which is still only slowly being understood.

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In the 80s came a growing recognition of plastic’s disposal problems. Microplastics – a term not coined until 2004 – had been discovered within the stomachs of newborn albatross chicks off the coast of Hawaii, the waters of the Long Island Sound and inside the guts of fish. What really became of all the plastic we tossed away? That decade, the petrochemical industry hatched a solution to the spiralling publicity crisis. Discarding plastic, contended its producers in a well-funded marketing pivot, need not destroy the planet. It could help it. For you didn’t need to throw plastic into a landfill. And you didn’t need to burn it. The solution was to recycle it.

Recycling per se is not a myth. It is possible to turn an old issue of the newspaper into a new issue of the newspaper. It is possible to turn an old aluminium can of Dr Pepper into a new aluminium can of Dr Pepper. The copper extracted from electronic waste and the steel sourced from dismantled ships do end up in new electronic products and new steel structures. But the idea that the majority of plastics could ever be effectively recycled was to prove by and large a con, an attempt to impose a “circular economy” on a material to which it does not truly apply. For it has never been possible to functionally or economically convert most old plastic into new plastic. The process just doesn’t work.

The most obvious difficulty pertains to the material. Plastic is a broad term for what is in fact thousands of different combinations of synthetic polymers that differ mainly in chemical complexion and quantity of additives. One recycling expert has likened plastics to cheeses: much as it is unfeasible to melt mozzarella down and expect to produce parmesan, so with plastic is it impossible to shred and reduce polyethylene in order to get polystyrene or polypropylene or polyvinyl chloride.

It was a problem evident as early as 1969 when, in a collection of studies funded by Esso and Chevron, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the petrochemical industry lamented the fact that the miracle of plastic stemmed from its peculiar chemical makeup. “It is ironic that the very molecular structure that has made [plastic] so popular creates certain disposal problems,” conceded Thomas Becnel, a Dow Chemical executive. Plastic didn’t naturally break down in landfill. It couldn’t be re-smelted. It just kept accumulating.

Then there are the economics of recycling. Manufacturing new plastic has always been cheaper than attempting to resurrect old plastic. “It is always possible that scientists and engineers will learn to recycle or dispose of wastes at a profit, but that does not seem likely to happen soon on a broad basis,” the American Chemistry Council claimed in a 1969 report entitled Cleaning Our Environment.

There is a related problem here. Even if old plastic could be turned into new plastic at a profit, it is not a process that can be replicated countless times – as it can with, say, steel. After two or three uses, plastic wears down beyond any ability to cycle back into production streams, meaning that recycling never prevents final disposal; it simply delays it. As the Vinyl Institute, a plastics lobby, conceded in 1986: “Recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

The final reason why recycling offers no feasible solution to the problem of plastic’s disposal? It is increasingly being revealed to be a poisoning process. Consumer plastic contains a variety of poorly regulated additives – flame retardants, plasticisers, stabilisers – that, were they to be discarded and shipped to developing countries within steel drums, would be considered hazardous forms of toxic waste and therefore an illegal export. And while you might be forgiven for thinking that the recycling process – washing and shredding those plastics and melting them down – would eliminate these poisons, recycling in fact has the opposite effect: leaching those toxins out and diffusing them throughout newly created plastic, a process known as migration.

Still, the most important argument against plastic recycling might be this: even if it were to work, even if it were to be profitable, even if it were to be safe, recycling plastic would still never address the engine driving our global trash crisis. This is our unsustainable production output. There now exists 40 years of evidence to demonstrate that countries claiming to recycle more also produce more plastic waste. Because there are a limited number of times that it can be resurrected, plastic invariably requires inputs of virgin resin during the manufacturing process, meaning that even the act of “recycling” plastic is never reducing waste but only ever guaranteeing more of it. Since the “solution” of plastic recycling was presented to the public, net plastic waste outputs in the US have skyrocketed, up from 60lb (27kg) a person a year in 1980 to 218lb (99kg) a person in 2018. The petrochemical industry knows all of this. It has known it for more than a generation now. Yet, all the same, recycling emerged as its answer to a cataclysmic trash pandemic of its own making.

In the summer of 2017, Turkey’s first lady emerged on a stage in the capital of Ankara and announced a grand new plan for İzzettin Akman’s country. Over the next 15 years, Emine Erdoğan proclaimed, Turkey would be turning itself into a “zero-waste” nation. Sure, other countries began their pivots to a green future by slashing fuel emissions or constructing windfarms or taxing carbon outputs. But Turkey’s transition, Erdoğan explained, would start elsewhere. It would begin within the homes of 85 million Turkish citizens. Turks would be eliminating their trash.

True enough, the country’s recent track record of discarding garbage had been dreadful. Over the previous 30 years, Turkey had become as addicted to plastic as any other place on Earth. Its network of public fountains – a tradition dating back half a millennium to the Ottoman sultans who aspired to adorn every community of their domain with marble sebils, “kiosks” of free-flowing water – had stood no chance against the unrelenting convenience of a water bottle made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, introduced to Turkey in 1984 and which, by the early 2000s, Turks were buying in the tens of millions every day. Street bazaars that sold fruits and nuts to shoppers bearing cotton sacks had given way to supermarkets that inserted every conceivable purchase into a low-density polyethylene bag – those plastic bags that are so flimsy you can see through them – which by 2010 Turks were discarding at the rate of 35bn a year.

More than 90% of all of this plastic was ending up in landfill, the countryside or the sea, a travesty captured in real time in Fatih Akin’s documentary Garbage in the Garden of Eden, in which the acclaimed Turkish German film-maker, returning after a long absence to his grandparents’ picturesque tea-growing village in the mountains above the Black Sea, chronicles a plan to convert its outskirts into an open-air dump site. No one in the village wanted the landfill; the authorities schemed behind their backs and it went ahead anyway. The result is the entirely foreseeable problem of plastic sloshing down into town, leading Akin to a grim conclusion: “Trash is the global excrement of our society.”

That Turkey, assured First Lady Erdoğan, would soon be just a bad memory. Her campaign would effect a “clean Turkey” through a state-sponsored campaign that would “prevent uncontrolled waste” by collecting plastic efficiently and recycling it, resulting in a “livable world for future generations”.

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A clean Turkey! A livable world! In the years to come, Zero Waste Project would garner Erdoğan accolades – “Zero Waste Project is not just a campaign, it is an emotion,” gushed one Istanbul daily – and award after award courtesy of global institutions ranging from the UN to the World Bank. She contributed to a book on her initiative, The World Is Our Common Home, and read it aloud to Turkish children herded into the garden of the presidential complex in Ankara, her husband’s 1,150-room palace whose construction had recently razed an ancient forest. Zero Waste Project would even be deployed as an instrument of foreign policy, espoused by Turkey’s diplomatic missions around the world to underscore its commitment to combating the climate crisis. “As members of a religion where waste is forbidden and a civilisation that kisses bread on the ground and puts it on their forehead, we have assumed a leading role against this threat,” vowed Turkey’s minister of foreign affairs, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.

Only there was one small problem with Turkey’s self-coronation as a zero-waste nation worthy of such international emulation. No sooner had Erdoğan announced her initiative than Turkey emerged as one of the biggest recipients – and one of the biggest dumpsites – of plastic waste anywhere on the planet.

Afew months after a truckload of garbage from the UK and Europe was set alight next to Akman’s citrus trees, and just weeks after Erdoğan pronounced Turkey a zero-waste nation, in 2017 the Chinese Communist party informed the world that it too would no longer be accepting trash.

The petrochemical sector’s recycling push in the 80s was always dishonest. Plastic recycling was known to be unfeasible. But at play was an even deeper injustice. Because over the coming decades it wouldn’t fall to rich countries to process the ever-mounting piles of their citizens’ plastic refuse. In the 90s, plastic waste would get shipped overwhelmingly to poorer countries, which were desperate for economic opportunity of any kind, and whose conversion into western trash receptacles came with an unbelievable irony: these were the very countries that could barely manage their own swelling trash outputs.

In the early 90s China became the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth. Dusty bags of cereal, crumpled soda fountain straws, squished polystyrene egg cartons – for years all these things you thought nothing of tossing away became the objects of arduous, globe-spanning, carbon-spewing journeys, getting trucked to a nearby materials recovery facility and thereafter to a port, then shipped thousands of miles beyond that to any number of hundreds of Chinese villages that specialised in processing the contents of your recycling bin.

By the early 2000s, American detritus had become one of the US’s biggest exports to China. At least as much plastic waste was getting jettisoned out of the EU from self-congratulating environmental stewards such as Germany, where state recycling quotas were often reliant on a filthy secret: much of the plastic that Germans claimed was getting recycled was in fact getting shipped to the other side of the world, where its true fate was far from clear.

When China informed the world that it would no longer be accepting its plastic waste, many rich countries just located desperate new buyers – or unguarded borders – and continued to insist that their trash was getting recycled. As for petrochemical companies, they possessed every reason to keep on encouraging the diversion of all this waste: it would prove harder for western consumers to recognise the extent of the crisis – that the narrative they had been told about recycling often isn’t true – so long as it kept getting relocated thousands of miles away.

Within months of China’s import ban, Greek garbage began surfacing in Liberia; Italian trash was wrecking the beaches of Tunisia; Dutch plastic started overwhelming Indonesia, its former colony. Poland would be forced to enlist a special police unit to patrol for waste getting trucked in from Germany. Trash exports from Europe to Africa quadrupled, Malaysia became the world’s greatest recipient of US plastic waste and the Philippines threatened Canada with war for dispatching containers of dirty diapers to the capital, Manila. And within less than a year of Erdoğan’s launch of the Zero Waste Project, more than 200,000 tonnes of plastic waste that would have headed to south-eastern China at any point in the previous 30 years made its way instead to south-eastern Turkey.

At its most innocuous, the global waste trade shifts garbage from the world’s richest countries to those places that can least afford to handle it. At its most nefarious, the global trash trade is an outright criminal enterprise. Turkey was to prove a showcase for both. Most of its imported plastic was arriving from the UK, whose waste brokers – the businesses that function as intermediaries between the (often) publicly funded collection of your trash and the (often) privatised business of what becomes of it – had narrowed in on an egregious incentive for exporting garbage. They received paycheques from a state that, in the wake of Brexit, struggled to find lorry drivers and port workers, resulting in surging transport costs and massive delays and mounting piles of refuse. At just the time that China announced that it would no longer be taking the world’s plastic garbage, the UK threw up its hands and offloaded the task of waste management on to practically anyone willing to take a stab at it.

In exchange for claiming to have collected 1 tonne of household plastic for recycling, a British waste broker could receive up to £70. Tens of thousands of waste brokers in the UK would eventually be found to be operating without legal permits, garbage parvenus looking to make quick cash off the UK’s desperate attempt to appear like a global paragon of environmentalism – and its even more desperate need to turn its plastic waste into someone else’s problem. So absurd was the situation that the Guardian journalist George Monbiot managed to register his long-deceased pet fish as a professional waste broker.

Soon half the plastic garbage the UK insisted was being recycled was being shipped abroad, approximately half of that to Turkey. And that was just year one. Within three years of Erdoğan’s announcement of the Zero Waste Project, more than 750,000 tonnes of old plastic was being diverted to Anatolia from across Europe, turning Turkey into the single greatest recipient of plastic waste on the planet. The equivalent of one dump truck full of foreign garbage was entering the country every six minutes.

To be fair, some of the plastic waste that got shipped to south-eastern Turkey really would be put to use. Its fate, however, was almost never to cycle back into its earlier form but to get turned into shoddy home goods. Through a stupefyingly energy-intensive and polluting process, western plastic was cleaned, shredded into flakes, chemically reduced, then converted into polyester, which in recent years had begun to replace world-renowned Turkish cotton as the preferred material of the country’s garment industry. If it wasn’t turned into carpet padding or dish towels, some of the plastic was burned in any number of Turkey’s cement factories, providing cheap – or even free – fuel for a construction industry that profited from erecting battalions of drab apartment buildings across Anatolia.

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But a lot of the plastic that headed to south-eastern Turkey was too dirty to convert into a bathmat or incinerate as fuel. Its fate would be that of the garbage İzzettin Akman observed getting set alight on the edge of his farm: to get covertly dumped somewhere in the countryside and spend the next tens of thousands of years breaking down into billions of minuscule plastic pieces that would enter the sea and devastate croplands.

Beginning in 2021, activists and journalists around Europe struck upon the idea of inserting GPS chips into empty bottles of laundry detergent or dishwasher soap, depositing them in local recycling bins, then tracking their movements thousands of miles to the east, to the most distant edge of Turkey, occasionally via wild odysseys that beggared belief in the dizzying amount of effort expended on moving material of such – apparently negligible – value. In one instance, journalists observed as a plastic bag dropped off at a storefront recycling bin outside a franchise of Tesco, a supermarket chain that liked to publicise its commitment to sustainability, got routed 80 miles from London to the port town of Harwich, from there to the Netherlands by ship, then to Poland by lorry before finally getting sent 2,000 miles south to the outskirts of Adana, where it was found in an industrial yard layered with tonnes of other European garbage.

Suffice it to say, by 2022 so much foreign trash was getting dumped under cover of night around Adana, across valleys or along rivers or indeed on the edge of farms, that the only way for local environmentalists to track its arrival was to monitor the region from several thousand feet in the air with drones. “About once a month we find a big new pile of garbage,” Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist at Çukurova University in Adana, told me.

I said goodbye to Akman after a few pleasant days in Adana in which spring seemed to elbow its way out of winter almost overnight, turning the city’s legion of orange trees into glorious shocks of white blooms. It was only after leaving the bursting Levantine landscape behind me that, while scrolling through my phone during the 13-hour bus ride back to Istanbul, I stumbled on a news article about one more Turkish government plan aimed at achieving “a significant reduction in the carbon footprint” of the country.

It was a plan focused on, of all places, the one I had just left – a slice of sun-shellacked Mediterranean coast due south of Akman’s farm. In October 2021, the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, flew to Adana to lay the foundation stone for a new petrochemical plant that would come to occupy a beachhead stretching the length of 2,000 football fields. The Turkish Wealth Fund, which was fronting $10bn for the “Ceyhan mega petrochemical industry zone”, insisted on its environmental bona fides. It claimed that turning south-eastern Turkey into a “global hub of petrochemicals” would ultimately reduce the country’s reliance on imported polyethylene, thereby freeing up Turkish capital to combat climate change in the longer term. The logic sounded like a parody of the arguments made by certain advocates of the green energy transition who maintain that accelerating carbon output in the next few years is justified by the streamlining of clean-energy sources it may guarantee for the rest of time.

Adana was no longer just going to take in trash, in other words. Instead it was going to build its future economy around it. And Turkey was no longer going to continue to feign any commitment to a zero-waste future. Instead it was going to throw itself into the madhouse business of manufacturing plastic – 3bn lb of it a year, the equivalent of 60bn plastic water bottles. You would no longer need drones to track it. It would be right there in front of you, in full view, getting cooked into existence.

And in all this – the transformation of the “fertile crescent” into one of the largest recipients of plastic on the planet, and a place that felt it had no other option but to open itself to the production of the very material destroying its hills and rivers and farms – it was hard not to detect a certain unnerving symbol of our age as well as a dire warning for our future.

This is an edited extract from Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish by Alexander Clapp, published by John Murray.