Plastic debris clings to the reeds in a waterway metres from where Ayhan*, a farmer in Adana, southern Turkey, is harvesting aubergines. “We get pollution from all sides here,” he says, referring to the plastic recycling zone upstream, as well as a nearby textile plant that he suspects is making the water acidic. “The plastics are all there, by the bank, and the fumes come this way.”

Between May 2021 and July 2024, 13 British companies sent 545 shipments of household and supermarket plastic waste, totalling 52,000 tonnes, to the Kemal Deniz recycling zone, under a mile from Ayhan’s aubergine fields, according to data analysed for the Guardian by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international NGO.

New research has also been shared with the Guardian that shows high levels of microplastics, as well as plastic debris, in Adana’s waterways, including one next to Kemal Deniz.

Fires from abandoned piles of unrecyclable plastic in the region create toxic smoke over neighbourhoods and fields, locals said.

“Every year we install the greenhouse tarps, and when we bring them down we have to clean the surface because we find a black coating, coming from the fumes of these places,” says Ayhan.

In January, canal water flooded on to his land after heavy rain, destroying seven hectares (17 acres) of crops, he claims. “We had to plant new ones. But what can we do? Nothing. Nowhere to file a complaint – nobody cares.”

Adana sits in Turkey’s Çukurova plain, one of the country’s most fertile regions, rich in cotton, soya beans and citrus fruits.

But since China’s 2018 ban on plastic waste imports, Turkey has become the primary destination for plastic waste from the EU and UK. Adana receives 60% of Turkey’s plastic waste imports – an influx that has overwhelmed local treatment infrastructure and sparked widespread illegal activities, including dumping and burning, according to investigations by environmental groups and journalists.

Sedat Gündoğdu, a Turkish marine biologist at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, who has been monitoring pollution in the region, says many of the recycling facilities discharge wastewater directly into canals and channels used for irrigation.

Samples of water he took from a canal downstream from Kemal Deniz, adjacent to Ayhan’s fields, show a 10-fold increase in concentrations of microplastics compared with sites upstream, according to research he published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.

Ayhan does not use the canal for irrigation, but the waterway next to his fields feeds into other canals that are used by farmers to water their crops, according to Gündoğdu.

“[The recycling facilities] are discharging this polluted water into the canals,” Gündoğdu says. “Farmers then use that water as an irrigation source.” He also found pellets, films and fragments “highly characteristic of recycling processing” waste.

He found that other canals downstream of recycling facilities in Adana separate from those in Kemal Deniz had even greater concentrations: at 132-fold that of upstream. The canal network traverses agricultural fields, leading to the Seyhan River and ultimately the Mediterranean Sea.

The Kemal Deniz zone is a sprawling, heavily guarded site that houses a series of storage warehouses and recycling facilities, some with the names of Turkish recycling companies, some with no visible identification. Piles of plastic lie scattered around the site, outside and inside the facilities. Security guards on motorcycles patrol the dirt roads around it.

An analysis of import/export data carried out for the Guardian by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) found that 13% of the UK’s exported plastic waste to Turkey was sent to the Kemal Deniz zone between May 2021 and July 2024. Thirteen British companies shipped waste, the top three exporters being ProtoGreen, Vanden and Eurokey.

There is no suggestion that, by shipping plastic waste to Turkey, the British companies are doing anything illegal. The companies do, however, have a duty under various regulations to ensure the plastic they export is recycled in an environmentally sound manner.

Turkey is the third-highest contributor to plastic leakage into the Mediterranean from mismanaged waste after Egypt and Italy, according to a 2020 International Union for Conservation of Nature report.

From entanglement and ingestion by marine species to the disruption of food chains, plastic wreaks havoc on marine life. Microplastics have also been found to hinder photosynthesis in plants and marine algae, the foundation of the ocean food web.

People living near the Kemal Deniz zone who have spoken to the Guardian say fires from waste plants in Adana create toxic smoke over residential areas four to five times a year.

The city is divided along socioeconomic lines: the north, where the wealthy live, and the south, made up of poorer residents and migrants, where the recycling facilities are located, according to Yaşar Gökoğlu, a spokesman for the environmental group Adana Ecology Platform.

“Even under normal working conditions, chemical pollution, water, air and soil pollution negatively affect their lives,” he says.

Last year, residents protested with Adana Ecology Platform outside the city law courts, after a blaze at a recycling facility near the Küçükdikili neighbourhood burned for 36 hours, creating a plume of thick toxic smoke that settled over the neighbourhood and nearby fields. The fenced-off facility is just over a mile north-west of the Kemal Deniz recycling zone. Fires have also happened at Kemal Deniz, according to reports.

Unlike the facilities at Kemal Deniz – which, the Guardian has established, is supplied by British companies – we could not determine whether the plastic waste entering this facility, half a mile west of Küçükdikili, was imported or domestic. However, a pile of waste that included British packaging was dumped on the roadside nearby.

A businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says: “Every month, between the first and fifth of the month, deliveries come. Trucks line up during those days on the street leading to the facilities.

“There are fires every summer in this area; there is a school right next to it. The neighbourhood is really concerned about it.”

The man said he had written a letter of complaint about the facility, but had not sent it. “Who is going to care?” he says.

Much of the plastic arriving in Adana includes mixed, dirty and contaminated plastic that ends up abandoned and burned, according to local people. The Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects estimates that unrecyclable material makes up almost 50% of the country’s plastic waste imports from the EU.

The UK, one of the world’s largest exporters of plastic waste, shipped out 675,000 tonnes in 2025 – its largest amount in eight years – of which almost 140,000 tonnes was shipped to Turkey. The EU’s plastic waste exports to Turkey that year reached more than 500,000 tonnes.

But while the EU has recently imposed stricter controls on its plastic waste exports to prevent environmental exploitation abroad, the UK government continues to export plastic waste – to countries not part of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of wealthy countries.

Amy Youngman, a legal specialist at the EIA, said: “The highest pollution levels in [Gündoğdu’s] study are directly linked to identifiable industrial sources. UK waste drives the very operations contributing to this pollution, and without it this harm would not occur at this scale, if at all.”

“The UK should take immediate action to end this colonial practice by phasing out plastic waste exports, strengthening traceability and enforcement, regulating microplastics and reducing plastic production to address the root causes of pollution,” she said.

James McLeary, the managing director of Biffa Polymers, said the UK needed to take “greater responsibility” for its own plastic waste and has called for targeted reforms. “Plastic waste should be processed within controlled environments in the UK wherever possible, rather than exported,” he said.

The UK government should ban the export of unprocessed plastic waste, reform the current system that incentivises exporting plastic waste rather than recycling it domestically and support domestic recycling, he added. Over recent years, 21 plastic recycling and processing facilities have closed in the UK.

A spokesperson for Eurokey, one of the top three UK exporters of waste to Turkey, said it only worked with “accredited partners” approved by the UK environment agency, and was surprised to learn of the findings. It no longer sent plastic waste to Turkey, they said.

“The reason plastic waste is sent abroad is that there is not enough domestic infrastructure to deal with it, but Eurokey is building its own recycling plant in Corby to address this,” they added.

A spokesperson for Vanden, another top exporter of waste to Turkey, said: “Any evidence of environmental harm should be investigated by the appropriate competent authority in Turkey.”

Vanden undertook assessments, they said, including visits and inspections of Turkish recycling facilities via representatives in the country.

While “no regulatory system can eliminate the risk of non-compliance by individual operators”, they said it would be “inaccurate” to characterise Turkey’s plastic waste import regime as unregulated. The spokesperson added that controls at national and facility level had “strengthened considerably” over recent years.

“We recognise the importance of ensuring that materials exported from the UK are recovered in an environmentally sound manner, and we support robust oversight throughout the recycling supply chain.”

ProtoGreen declined to comment.

A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said: “There are already strict controls in place on the export of waste set out in UK legislation.

“Businesses involved in the export of waste from the UK are required to ensure that the waste they ship is managed in an environmentally sound manner, and we have already taken action to further reduce our need to export plastic waste.”

The Turkish government was approached for comment but did not respond.

*Name has been changed to protect identity