THE WASTE LAND

When China stopped receiving the world's refuse, Turkey became Europe's recycling hotspot. S The problem is, most plastics | can't be recycled. And what remains are toxic heaps of trash

- Alexander Clapp

On a chilly evening in late 2016, a few kilometres from the Turkish city of Adana, a Kurdish farmer named İzzettin Akman was sitting on the second-floor balcony of his concrete ranch house when a construction truck backed up to the edge of his citrus groves, paused, then dumped a great load of rubbish along the roadside. Before he pulled away, the truck's driver set a paper bag on fire and tossed it on top of the garbage, triggering an outpouring of flames blacker than the night sky into which they ascended. Akman leapt up, put on his sandals and sprinted out along his dirt driveway toward the crackling trash pile.

The trash, by the time Akman got to it, was a hissing mass of fire. Plastic is less flammable than wood or paper, though it emits more heat as it burns. It is at least as capable as either of getting swept up in a gust of wind and, in Akman's case, setting alight about 20 hectares of orange and lemon trees. "Son of a bitch!" Akman wheeled around, ran back home, located a bucket, then rushed back to the conflagration, which he began dousing with water lifted out of a stream by the edge of the road.

Akman kept pouring. After about an hour, the flames started to dampen, then die, revealing a bed of thousands of half-incinerated fragments of garbage. Akman knelt down to examine the smouldering pile, turning over bits of candy wrappers and makeup containers with his fingers before being struck by something peculiar. The writing on the packaging wasn't Kurdish. It wasn't Turkish either. Akman kept clawing through the still-scalding plastic, looking for price labels. He found several. They were in euros and pounds.