On the edge of Adana's Çukurova plain — a region that produces cotton, citrus and soya beans for markets across the Middle East and Europe — plastic debris clings to the reeds along irrigation canals that farmers rely on to keep their crops alive. Ayhan, who grows aubergines a few hundred metres from the Kemal Deniz recycling zone, describes a slow accumulation of damage: a black coating on his greenhouse tarps each season, canal floodwater that destroyed seven hectares of crops last January, and fumes that drift across his fields from fires burning unrecyclable plastic waste. "Nowhere to file a complaint — nobody cares," he says. Between May 2021 and July 2024, thirteen British companies sent 545 shipments of household and supermarket plastic — totalling 52,000 tonnes — to the Kemal Deniz facility, according to data analysed by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

China's 2018 ban on plastic waste imports redirected enormous volumes of material toward Turkey, which has since become the principal destination for plastic discarded by EU and UK consumers. Adana alone receives roughly 60% of all plastic waste imported into Turkey, a volume that has far exceeded the region's treatment capacity and fuelled widespread illegal dumping and burning. The consequences can now be measured scientifically. Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist at Sabancı University's Istanbul Policy Center, collected water samples from a canal running directly alongside Ayhan's fields and found microplastic concentrations ten times higher downstream from Kemal Deniz than upstream — a pattern consistent with direct wastewater discharge from recycling facilities into channels used for irrigation.

High levels of plastic debris were recorded in multiple Adana waterways.