Germany declares U-turn on Turkish waste export scandal, activists celebrate press power

05 Jan 2022 --- The German government is announcing it will repatriate plastic waste illegally exported to Turkey, in what environmental groups are hailing a triumph for the power of media pressure and public activism.

Following a year-long saga that saw 141 containers of waste land in Turkey and either left to spoil or, in some cases, sent further afield to East Asia, the German government has made a U-turn on its refusal to accept responsibility for the exports. 

Speaking to PackagingInsights, Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network, says there was previously not enough political pressure from Turkey or the German Federal government to act. 

“The media attention changed this pressure dynamic,” he states. He explains that a lack of international legal frameworks makes it easy for governments to covertly use less-developed nations as cheap dumping grounds for their waste. 

“It is difficult to enforce international environmental law from any position other than national governments. If Germany continued to ignore their obligations, our most effective strategy would be to shame them on the international stage.” 

The shame game 
Evidently, this humiliation strategy is having the intended impact. Yesterday, we reported that Germany was continuing to refuse responsibility for the waste, despite knowing that (like most waste exported out of the EU) it would likely end up dumped or incinerated in poorer global regions. 

Turkey is a favorite dumping ground for EU waste.Puckett explains the German authorities could claim the export was legal since the new Basel Convention control procedures on plastic (which forbid hazardous plastic waste exports of this kind) were not enforced until 2021 after the shipments had been sent. 

Turkish plastics pollution researcher Sedat Gündoğdu tells PackagingInsights this is typical of how western nations circumvent ethical standards to reduce costs at the expense of environmental and human health around the globe. 

“Money talks, and the environment loses,” he says, while Germany “plays dead.”

However, the German government has now announced it is willing to take back all the waste and has charged the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg with managing the takeback, along with all of the companies and regions involved.

“The federal German government official we spoke with claims that they so far do not have cooperation with the Turkish authorities to return the waste, but Germany is fully committed to doing so,” says Puckett.

The blame game 
A key theme throughout this case is the blurred international legislation, which has seen both Turkey and Germany refuse responsibility for the waste. During the campaign to force Germany to repatriate the containers, which BAN and Greenpeace Germany led, dozens of the containers disappeared from Turkey and were intercepted en route to Vietnam.

Puckett says it is unclear who is responsible for ordering the wastes to be sent to third countries like Vietnam. Regardless, the entire story exemplifies much of what Gündoğdu calls “waste colonialism,” where wealthy nations boost their domestic recycling credentials by exporting and knowingly polluting less developed countries.

Puckett says despite this ironic scenario, “Germany continues to press its luck.”Activists accuse Germany of “playing dead” rather than taking responsibility.

The exposure created by activist groups and the media, and the subsequent public outrage building around these dynamics, appear – in this case – to have forced German authorities to accept accountability. 

If and how Turkey will help Germany resolve the issue is now the question, according to government spokespeople. 

Waste mafias 
Illegal waste smuggling is one of the world’s most lucrative and endemic trades, and growing public awareness of the issue is leading to increasing pressure on private and public enterprises implicated in the trade. 

In 2020, investigative journalists in Tunisia discovered Italian politicians were colluding with companies operating a cost avoidance scheme, whereby Italian organization Sviluppo Risorse Ambientali circumvented domestic waste disposal costs and illicitly sent 282 shipping containers of mixed municipal waste to Tunisia, where fees are almost 20 times lower. 

Last year, recycling company TerraCycle UK was discovered sending its plastic waste to Bulgaria for incineration (something the company claims was an accident) and is now under continued scrutiny for what investigators believe to be routine illegal exports. 

The EU recently pledged additional resources to its Anti-Fraud Office as part of its Green New Deal. To what extent this can effectively stem the flow of illegal waste trafficking and the other criminal activities conducted by these smuggling networks remains uncertain. 

By Louis Gore-Langton