Black smoke drifts over the waste incinerators of Istanbul, Adana and Mersin — smoke that makes the people exposed to it ill and poisons the environment and animals. This smoke, produced by the burning of plastic, is also due to the increase in the export of plastic waste from European countries to Turkey.
For 25 years, China was the main buyer of European plastic waste. This ended when the Chinese government announced in 2018 that it would no longer import plastic waste in the future. When other countries like Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand followed suit, Europe found a new dumping ground in Turkey.
Plastic waste exports increase by 102 percent
Turkey is an attractive country to export plastic waste to due to its geographical proximity as well as good trade relations with the EU. According to Greenpeace, plastic waste exports from Germany to Turkey increased by 102 percent from 2019 to 2020. A total of 136,083 tonnes of plastic waste ended up there, making Turkey the main buyer of European plastic waste in 2020. There, the plastic waste is meant to be recycled according to European standards prior to being reused by the Turkish industry for petroleum-based products.
Yet what is presented as a win-win-situation mostly serves European interests. The main motivation is, as so often, the accumulation of capital, which is carried out on the backs of countries of the Global South as well as emerging economies like turkey. Exporting plastic waste to countries like Turkey is profitable: recycling is much cheaper there than in EU countries like Germany. It is no surprise that Germany ranks third among the countries that export the most plastic waste to Turkey.
Plastic waste that poisons people, animals, and the environment
According to reports of organisations such as Human Rights Watch, the main problem is the lack of checks on whether the recycling process is actually carried out according to European standards. Buyers in Turkey have a great interest in importing as much of the waste as possible, as it is a lucrative business. On the part of the European waste management companies, there are often only superficial checks to see whether the buyers are actually suitable for disposing of the waste properly. Some waste ends up in temporary storage facilities, where it is simply incinerated.
Waste that causes illness
In addition, only pure plastic is allowed to be shipped to Turkey, but often this is not the case. The packaging is often not made of pure plastic, but of a plastic-mixture. Among other things, it contains flame retardants, plasticisers and carcinogenic dyes. The combustion of these substances potentiates their carcinogenic effect.
The majority of the exported waste is also industrial waste. This means that environmentally conscious citizens in Germany and other EU countries who reduce their plastic waste can hardly make a difference here. As is often the case, there is a lack of political measures to stop the plastic problem.
Waste on the beaches and in the sea
Another problem: even before the rapid increase in plastic waste imports, Turkey was not keeping up with recycling its own waste. Turkish streets, beaches and the sea have been covered with waste for years. Turkey's coastal regions on the Mediterranean Sea, for example, were among the worst littered with plastic waste in the world in 2019.
I was able to witness this immense plastic waste pollution myself every year when I spent the summer with my family in Ayvalık, a small coastal town on the Turkish Aegean. There you could walk the beaches several times a day, collect rubbish and find new plastic waste after only a few hours every time you walked along the beach. My cousins Ella and Lara took photos of the plastic waste pollution during one of these beach walks.
The fact that the beaches are so quickly littered with plastic again is also due to the fact that it is often very windy in coastal regions like Ayvalık. If the rubbish is not disposed of correctly, the wind carries it everywhere – onto the beaches and into the sea. There, fish and other marine life ultimately die from eating the plastic waste, as organisations like WWF report.
New EU law
A new EU law could put an end to the massive export of plastic waste in the future. For example, on 17 January, members of the European Parliament voted in favour of a law to ban the export of plastic waste to non-OECD countries, such as Indonesia.
Further, the law should also have a positive impact on countries that are members of the OECD, such as Turkey, by phasing out exports to those countries within four years. The EU Council has yet to vote on the law. If the law passes, this could have a positive effect.
Organisations such as Greenpeace however have always demanded that reusable systems be expanded in order for masses of plastic waste not to arise in the first place. Such waste that cannot be prevented in the future should then be disposed of and recycled under high ecological and social standards. These could be approaches to make industrial nations like Germany, which have a large share in plastic waste pollution and thus also in CO² emissions, more responsible in the future.
This article was also published in German