Greenpeace delivers half a million petitions to 10 Downing Street against waste exports to Turkey

Photos: Greenpeace

Click to read the article in Turkish

Signatures of 72,000 people as part of a Greenpeace Turkey campaign against the country's plastic waste imports were delivered to the house of PM Boris Johnson of UK today (March 24).

The campaign was launched in 2019 after Turkey became Europe's top plastic waste importer and helped raise awareness of the issue. Turkey's Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change imposed restrictions on plastic waste imports in 2021.

With the restrictions, the amount of plastic waste sent from the UK to Turkey decreased for a while but it increased again after the issue fell off the agenda.

In the last three years, Turkey imported some 468,000 tons of plastic waste from the UK. Most of this waste was left in nature or burned in Turkey's southern province of Adana.

The Waste Games 2021 report by Greenpeace Turkey showed all the five waste sites in Adana were contaminated with dangerous chemicals and the level of toxicity in the soil at one site was unprecedented.

CLICK - Plastic waste imported from Europe poisoning Turkey's soil, shows Greenpeace analysis 

CLICK - Turkey bans import of polymer waste after becoming Europe's top waste importer 

CLICK - Turkey top importer of plastic waste from Europe again 

"It's shameful"

Maja Darlington, a plastics campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said, "It's shameful that we continue to dump our dangerous plastic waste onto other countries.

"While it's out of sight and out of mind for us here in the UK, in Turkey where we've dumped it, the plastic pollution poisons the land, endangers peoples' health and destroys nature.

"Together with our friends in Turkey, we are calling on our government to end this disgraceful practice by immediately banning waste exports and reducing plastic use across society through ambitious reduction targets."

"Numbers are climbing again"

Nihan Temiz Ataş, biodiversity project lead at Greenpeace Turkey, said,

"The UK exported 486,000 tons of plastic waste alone to Turkey in the last three years.

"Even though Turkey's imports seem to be decreasing with the introduction of the polyethylene ban for a period but following its abolition at a historic speed, we see that the numbers are climbing without any lessons being learned.

"Turkey is neither the UK nor Europe's garbage dump. At Greenpeace Turkey, with the Game of Waste report we published in February 2022, we witnessed that our land was 400,000 times more polluted than uncontaminated land.

"How many more animals and people are needed to be affected in order for all this waste flow to stop? The UK government must urgently learn to deal with its own waste within its borders and ban the export of waste."

(TP/VK)