How The Global Waste Trade Passes The Buck Across The World
Richer countries often dispose of trash by paying someone else to make it their problem. And trying to recycle plastic doesn’t always help the planet.
The following is an excerpt from Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
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Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
There is a gap between what the citizens know about their waste and what actually happens to their waste.
— Yeo Bee Yin, former minister of Malaysia, 2018
Just a few months after a truckload of Western garbage was set alight next to İzzettin Akman’s citrus trees, and only weeks after Emine Erdoğan pronounced Turkey a “zero waste” nation, the Chinese Communist Party informed the world that it, too, was recalibrating its relationship with trash.
It would no longer be accepting it.
Since the early 1990s, when your discarded plastic Coke bottle first emerged as a major object of global commerce, China had been the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth. If you’re reading this now, consider for a moment that hundreds and hundreds of pounds of trash that you’ve discarded over the course of your life and probably never thought about again went on to live a strange, hot-potato second existence. Dusty bags of cereal, crumpled soda fountain straws, squished Styrofoam egg cartons— for years all these things you deemed so worthless you were willing to freely dispense with them became the objects of arduous, globe-spanning, carbon-spewing journeys, getting trucked tens, perhaps hundreds, of miles from your house 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 specialized in processing the contents of your recycling bin.
From the United States, much of it was transported aboard cargo container ships that had first crossed the Pacific loaded with cheap consumer goods— dog toys, key chains, selfie sticks, you name it— before returning to China packed with (what else?) the plastic and paper in which those goods had been packaged.
By the early 2000s, America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away. At least as much plastic was getting jettisoned out of the European Union, from self-congratulating environmental stewards like Germany, whose 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 far side of the world, where its true fate was far from clear.
In 2017, China may have informed the world that it would no longer be accepting its plastic waste. But this hardly stopped rich countries from angling to get it all as far away as possible. Many just located desperate new buyers— or unguarded borders— and continued to insist that it was getting recycled. Within months, Greek garbage started surfacing in Liberia. Italian trash wrecked the beaches of Tunisia. Dutch plastic overwhelmed Thailand. Poland would be forced to charter a special police unit to patrol for waste getting trucked in from Germany, while French cops who had once busied themselves with checking the fenders of cars arriving from neighboring Belgium for heroin became tasked instead with inspecting trunks for bags of garbage. 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 of Manila.
And within less than a year of Mrs. Erdoğan’s launch of the Zero Waste Project, more than 200,000 tons of plastic waste that would have headed to southeastern China at any point in the previous thirty years made its way instead to. . . southeastern 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 waste trade is an outright criminal enterprise.
Turkey was to prove a showcase in both. Most of its imported plastic was arriving from the United Kingdom, whose waste brokers— the businesses that function as intermediaries between the (often) publicly funded collection of your trash and the (often) privatized business of what becomes of it— had narrowed in on an egregious incentive for exporting garbage. They received paychecks from a state that, in the wake of Brexit, struggled to find truck drivers and port workers, resulting in surging transport costs and massive delays and mounting piles of refuse. Just when China had stopped taking the world’s plastic, the United Kingdom threw up its hands and offloaded the task of waste management onto anyone willing to take a stab at it. In exchange for claiming to have collected one ton of household plastic for “recycling,” a British waste broker could receive up to £70. More than 250,000 waste brokers in the United Kingdom 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, one journalist would endeavor to register his longdeceased pet fish as a professional waste broker. Within four minutes, Algernon the Goldfish had received his very own license to start transporting British trash.
The best part? No one seemed very concerned about what became of all that waste. Soon, half the plastic garbage the United Kingdom insisted was being “recycled” was being shipped abroad, approximately half of it to Turkey.
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And that was just year one. Within three years of Mrs. Erdoğan’s announcement of the Zero Waste Project, more than 750,000 tons of old plastic was shipped to Anatolia from across Europe, turning the allegedly wasteless nation of Turkey into what was in fact 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 southeastern Turkey really would be put to use. Its fate, however, was almost never to cycle back into its earlier form, not to become a new candy wrapper or a new makeup container but to get turned into shoddy home goods. Through an astonishingly energy-intensive and toxinsunleashing 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 principal feedstock 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 (not a few of which would crumble to smithereens in February 2023 after a large earthquake cracked the region).
But a lot of the plastic that headed to southeastern Turkey was too worthless or dirty to convert into a bath mat 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 millions of minuscule plastic pieces that would enter the sea, devastate croplands, and sprinkle hillsides.
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 London franchise of Tesco, a British supermarket chain that liked to publicize its commitment to sustainability, got routed eighty miles from London to the port town of Harwich, from there to the Netherlands by ship, then to Poland by truck, before finally getting sent two thousand miles south to the outskirts of Adana, where it was found in an industrial yard layered with European garbage.
A single used plastic bag! Transported three thousand miles by ship and truck! A little flickering light cast into the wilderness of globalized waste trafficking that had turned the Kurdish lands of Turkey into its latest— and perhaps most unsuspecting— victim. 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, 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 Adana’s Çukurova University, told me.
I said goodbye to İzzettin 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 orange trees into glorious shocks of white blooms. It was only after leaving the bursting Levantine landscape behind me, while scrolling through my phone somewhere on the thirteen-hour bus ride back to Istanbul, that I stumbled upon 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 exactly due south of Akman’s farm. In October 2021, President Erdoğan flew to Adana to lay the foundation stone for a propane dehydrogenation plant that would come to occupy a beachhead stretching the length of two thousand football fields. The Turkish Wealth Fund, which was fronting $10 billion for the “Ceyhan Mega Petrochemical Industry Zone,” insisted on its environmental bona fides: turning southeastern 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— logic that sounded almost like a mocking parody of the arguments made by advocates of the green energy transition, that accelerating carbon output in the next few years is worth the eventual decoupling from hydrocarbons it may guarantee for the rest of time.
Adana was no longer just going to take in trash, in other words. And Turkey was no longer going to continue to feign any commitment to a “zero waste” future. Instead, they were going to throw themselves into the madhouse business of manufacturing plastic— three billion pounds of it a year, the equivalent of a hundred billion 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, the place from which human civilization had first spread out across the globe, into one of the largest recipients of plastic on the planet, a landscape so liable to being despoiled that it required surveilling by remote control flying robots, and a place that seemingly had no option but to open itself to the production of the very material trashing 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.
Excerpted from the book WASTE WARS: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp. Copyright © 2025 by Alexander Clapp. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.