Ecological destruction is often reduced to technical problems or poor planning. Yet when we dig beneath these narratives, the same thing emerges from every ecological problem: class politics, a system of exploitation, and inequality. Indeed, destruction is not a coincidence but rather the ordinary functioning of this system of production and consumption. This two-day series starts from this point and examines the issue of waste not through recycling slogans or calls for individual responsibility, but as a globally organized mechanism of exploitation. Today, I will try to examine how waste has turned into a cross-border regime of injustice, and tomorrow how this regime seeps into bodies, everyday life, and consciousness.
The issue of waste lays bare ecological injustice and class domination in all their nakedness. One of the scenes that most deeply wounds our sense of justice is that the cost of limitless consumption in wealthy countries is paid by poor people living in distant geographies. Moreover, this cost is paid merely to survive, collected through precarious work, severe health risks, illnesses, and early deaths.
We cannot close this picture by saying “it is the fault of consumers in rich countries.” What is decisive here is the growth-oriented consumption economy and the institutional structures that keep it standing. Today, more than half of global single-use plastic production is in the hands of 20 companies, while the top 100 companies account for roughly 90 percent of global volume. This production chain does not turn on its own, finance is also part of the picture, and just 20 banks finance 60 percent of plastic producers. Therefore, the issue is not so much where we throw our trash, but who produces waste, within which economic order, and how.
At this point, I would again like to refer to the COP summit to be held in Antalya in November. COP summits are a diplomatic showcase that addresses the climate crisis on a narrow axis of “emissions targets, technology promises, voluntary commitments.” By contrast, it is important to establish a ground for an ecological-political reading; otherwise, such summits turn into displays that try to manage the consequences of the crisis rather than discuss its causes.
In this context, the “Zero Waste” project that the government has boasted about for years is also a striking example. This approach, which does not question production, companies, or financing and shifts responsibility onto individuals’ shoulders, does not reduce waste but merely makes it invisible. Moreover, it employs those who collect that waste street by street under heavy, precarious, and often unregistered conditions. It is hardly surprising that many companies providing services under the name of zero waste come from capital close to the government. Such greenwashing policies must be read carefully, because a genuine ecological policy has to start with the production regime itself.
Therefore, the issue is entirely structural, and language plays the leading role in the construction of this structure. Because the economic and political order shapes our relationship with nature not only through laws and projects but also through words. For centuries, nature was seen as a common entity, but within capitalist logic it is defined as “resource, reserve, raw material.” This language strips nature of being a living whole and commodifies every natural area and form of life; what remains is waste, toxic burden, and poverty. It severs the relationship between humans and nature and presents waste as a normal outcome. Yet there is no waste in nature, and this principle finds expression not only in modern ecological literature but also in local knowledge passed down through generations. A sample story told in rural areas illustrates this strikingly:
This anecdote describes a form of relationship in which there is no waste: an order in which everything is included in another life cycle, and even “surplus” never becomes useless. Indeed, this is one of the most fundamental principles of ecology; everything goes somewhere, becomes part of another process. Today, however, industry creates waste at a scale and speed that break this cycle. It is calculated that the amount of plastic produced since production began in the 1950s has reached a level that could cover the entire surface of the Earth with stretch film. In Turkey, meanwhile, the amount of plastic waste per capita has reached 128 kilograms per year. This figure does not even include imported waste.
The numbers are large, but the issue is not complex. The companies that generate waste, their production volumes, and their chains of responsibility can today be easily monitored from a technical standpoint. Despite this, no state introduces binding regulations against capital owners. On the contrary, they encourage and finance these companies, and instead of solving the problem they merely move the waste elsewhere. Indeed, it is calculated that more than half of the waste produced by the European Union is sent to the global waste market.
Waste exports have become so widespread that a neoliberal service sector known today as the “waste economy” has emerged. The background is simple: labor is expensive in Europe, recycling is burdensome and costly, whereas exporting waste is very cheap. For this reason, waste companies in the EU, within this profit-maximization-oriented system, ship the waste they collect to poor countries instead of processing it. Moreover, they do so under the name of “recycling.” Yet this is almost entirely a lie: according to 2024 data, only about 10 percent of the waste produced globally can actually be recycled.
In this system, waste is a “negatively priced” raw material for companies. Normally, when a company puts its goods on the market it earns revenue; here, the opposite is true. Waste is a burden for companies, and money is paid when it is put on the market in order to get rid of it. These funds are transferred to mafia-like networks and informal structures in poor countries. The entire process is legitimized through the discourse of “recycling” and “environmentalism.” Piles of trash bearing stylish recycling logos are left on agricultural lands and living spaces in poor countries. Ecological destruction is put into circulation wrapped in green imagery.
Turkey, meanwhile, is at the center of this dirty cycle. This is because there are very few countries with cheap, precarious, and informal labor capable of carrying such a waste burden at this scale. A dense migrant population, a large informal economy, and weak inspection mechanisms make waste imports very attractive for capital in Turkey. Indeed, between 2016 and 2022, Turkey increased its plastic waste imports from Europe by more than tenfold, and as of 2021 it became the European Union’s largest recipient of plastic waste.
How dangerous this business is became clear in 2017, when China banned waste imports. Toxic pollution is deadly; the health and environmental costs it creates far exceed its economic return. Despite this, inspection mechanisms do not function. For example, it is recorded that approximately 1.5 million waste shipments are sent each year from Dutch ports alone, yet it is reported that only 624 of them are inspected. In other words, only 4 out of every 10,000 shipments. They know it should be inspected, but they do not do it.
All of this shows that waste is a result of the inequalities, exploitation, and invisible labor regimes produced by neoliberal political economy. It is a form of domination that is spatially externalized: what is dirty is pushed away from the center, and its burden is dumped onto the land, air, and lives of others. This chain, stretching from the table to the street, from factories to supermarket shelves, and finally to ports, draws a silent yet extremely clear class map of who will live in a clean world and who in a dirty one.
Today we examined the regime of injustice created through waste. But the issue does not end here; it will continue in tomorrow’s piece. Because this pollution does not remain where it is buried or where it is sent. It returns to our bodies, our health, and our everyday lives, and this ideology is finely woven into our consciousness. A genuine confrontation with the ecological crisis requires not only tracing waste, but also questioning the economic and ideological order that produces it. Otherwise, waste merely changes places, while the crisis remains exactly the same.
*With my thanks to Mustafa Yıldırım, a teacher who farms like a peasant in the Soma-Yırca village, for recording and conveying this story and many others.
“In the late Ottoman period, in a family that migrated to Kırkağaç, a father called his child and, giving him an amount equivalent to 20 liras per day in today’s terms, said, ‘Go buy food for us, and for our horse and our chickens as well.’ The child went to the shopkeeper, conveyed what his father had said, and handed over the money. The shopkeeper was surprised, looked at the money and then at the child. Then he thought for a moment and gave him a melon: ‘Take this. You eat the inside, give the rind to your horse, and let your chickens eat the seeds,’ he said.”*
