Plastic sent for recycling in Turkey found dumped and burned in Adana province. Photo:PA
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | MAY 17th 2021
An investigation headed by Greenpeace has found that the United Kingdom’s plastics, sent over to Turkey for recycling purposes, were in fact being haphazardly dumped and burned, or in worse cases even left to further pollute the oceans.
Well over half of the plastics the government claims are being recycled appropriately are in reality being sent over to other countries. The UK has been infamous for paying other countries to accept their garbage exports for a long while now, especially to countries that don’t actually have the required infrastructure to correctly recycle.
Among the latest of these countries is Turkey. According to Greenpeace investigators, many of the plastics sent over to the country are not being recycled as they were designed to be, but are instead being burned, left to pile up, or accidentally allowed to slip into the already polluted oceans.
This is a particular point of contention, with between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic already entering the ocean annually, according to 2015 figures published in the journal Science. A number that hasn’t improved since then.
“As this new evidence shows, plastic waste coming from the UK to Turkey is an environmental threat, not an economic opportunity,” said the biodiversity projects lead at Greenpeace Mediterranean, Nihan Temiz Ataş. “Uncontrolled imports of plastic waste do nothing but increase the problems that exist in Turkey’s own recycling system.”
In 2020, somewhere around 688,000 tonnes of plastic packaging were exported out of the UK (an average of 1.8m kilos) where only 486,000 tonnes were appropriately recycled within the country. This shows that the UK is responsible for more plastic exports into other countries than it is for its own recycling processes.
Before Turkey, China had been the primary place to which the UK had sent the majority of its garbage. Since China’s 2017 import ban on waste, however, the UK had decided to look for other places to dump their garbage in, rather than take care of it themselves – that place has become Turkey.
Turkey’s imports of UK waste have seen significant growth from 12,000 tonnes in 2016 to 209,642 tonnes in 2020. This covers about 30% of all the UK’s plastic waste exports. The Greenpeace investigators found plenty of plastics from British supermarkets treated inappropriately, some of which had also been found on the Mediterranean coast.
