The European Union exported some 660,000 tons of plastic waste to Turkey in 2020, making it the bloc’s largest plastic waste destination, according to a report by Bloomberg Businessweek’s Turkish edition, citing the latest figures released by Eurostat and the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics.
Turkey’s plastic waste import increased 13 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year.
According to the report in the last 16 years the amount of plastic coming from Europe to Turkey has increased 196-fold.
Turkey has become the leading importer of European waste in the last few years.
The European Union exported some 13.7 million tons of waste to Turkey in 2020.
The EU’s second largest export destination for waste was India, which received almost 2.9 million tons of waste from the EU in 2020.
The EU countries exported 32.7 million tons of waste last year.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 0.57 million tons of plastic enters Mediterranean waters every year.
Plastic pollution will keep growing, with plastic waste generation in the region expected to quadruple by 2050, according to WWF.
WWF’s new report shows that Mediterranean countries’ comprehensive failure to manage their plastic waste is significantly contributing to record levels of plastic pollution in the Mediterranean Sea and costing the regional economy hundreds of millions of euros each year.