On his way to a remote industrial zone at the edge of Istanbul, Adnan Khan compares it to something out of Mad Max. Packs of wild dogs roam around desolate wastelands; toxic chemicals spill out into the street, with corrugated metal sheets and “slapdash factories” scattered around. “It’s like a shantytown,” he says.
However, once he sets foot inside some of these factories, he reaches for a different cinematic comparison. This time he’s thinking of the torture-horror film Saw, as he witnesses Afghan refugees working and living in conditions that he says fit the UN definition of modern-day slavery.
Khan, a journalist, had been visiting three young men working in a factory – Samim, Hayat and Khalid – every week as he researched a story about refugee workers in the recycling industry. Then one day in 2022, Hayat asked Khan: “Did you hear what happened to Arifullah Fazli?” He showed Khan a photo on his phone of a young man who worked in a different factory. It was a harrowing image: a lifeless body, legs missing, laid out on the floor surrounded by piles of trash. He had been killed in an accident involving a recycling compactor machine.
“The moment I was shown his body was such a shock,” says Khan. “The story became much bigger.”
The ensuing investigation has resulted in a three-part podcast series, Boy Wasted. It is produced by the team behind the BBC’s award-winning investigative podcast, Buried, and published by the environmental news title ENDS Report and the Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer. It reveals that Afghan refugees are not only being exploited by unscrupulous recycling factory owners, living in fear of deportation with no power or agency and working in perilous conditions – they are also dying at alarming rates while sorting through our rubbish. The UK exports thousands of tonnes of plastic waste to Turkey every year.
“We thought we were looking into one mysterious body,” says Dan Ashby, one of the podcast’s producers and hosts, along with Lucy Taylor and Khan. “But what emerged was a whole broken system that is full of criminality and death.”
As part of the investigation, the organisation İSİG Meclisi, which tracks workplace deaths in Turkey, carried out the first ever analysis of workplace deaths in Turkish recycling. It revealed deeply troubling findings. The researchers discovered that two people are crushed, ripped or burned to death in the recycling sector every month, and this has been the case for the last decade.
“I just couldn’t believe it when these numbers started coming out,” says Ashby. “More than 200 boys and men have died in the last 10 years. So it then became an inquiry into: what are we doing with our plastic? What kind of workplaces is this enabling? What kind of organised crime is there?”
The rubbish industry is a huge one. “Britain’s biggest export is waste,” says Ashby. “That’s what we make the most of now.” It has become so vast and profitable – and in many cases unregulated and unchecked – that one Environment Agency worker who features in the podcast describes it as being like “the wild west” and says that “waste crime is the new narcotics”. It’s a mammoth task to tackle.
“A fifth of UK waste now passes through criminal hands,” says Taylor. “I’m sure the Environment Agency are doing everything they can with the resources they have, but there are only five full-time officers checking all the waste coming out of England’s ports.” Approximately 9m waste containers pass through UK ports every year, but only 0.02% are being inspected. “So when that waste arrives in Istanbul and isn’t what it’s supposed to be, it’s passed on to more and more dodgy smaller businesses,” says Taylor. “And they don’t have to do what they should do with it because no one’s checking.”
Since China banned plastic waste imports in 2018, Turkey has become a top destination for exports of plastic, with more illegal factories popping up to meet demand. There have already been reports that this plastic ends up being burned instead of recycled.
Boy Wasted unearths a sinister picture of the human cost. It looks into cover-ups, payoffs and bribes, as well as a widespread indifference to the deaths of refugees, who, Khan says, are treated as “subhuman” and like animals. “Everybody is aware and it’s totally in the open,” he adds. “One boss literally said to me at a recycling facility: ‘My business wouldn’t survive without these people. We need the cheap labour for this industry to survive.’” Some of the undocumented workers work 14- to 16-hour days and live in storage cupboards inside the factories, with no access to running water or toilets.
The industry is so reliant on exploiting this workforce that companies budget for compensation money to be paid to their families in the event of their deaths. In the podcast, Aslı Odman of İSİG Meclisi refers to this as “blood money”.
“It’s accounted for in businesses,” says Ashby. “The idea that you don’t pay insurance or you don’t get safe equipment because it’s cheaper just to lose lives … that is such gross negligence and awful callousness towards human life that I can’t even think of a word for it.” Odman does find the word for it, though. “I think we have the right to call it murder,” she says in the series.
The podcast is an arresting and horrific insight into the link between consumption, waste and the loss of human life. It’s also a story that Ashby feels is especially timely. “With the great dehumanising of refugees in Europe and Britain that is going on, we’ve set out to humanise these people and to inhabit their world every single part of the way,” he says. “I hope even if listeners don’t care about plastic and the environment, it might be interesting from that perspective.”
Aside from conveying empathy during a time of widespread cruelty, there’s also a searing environmental message burned into the show. “By sending so much dodgy waste out into the world, we are creating this system,” says Ashby. “We enable the deaths of refugees. Not just Britain – there’s other countries as well – but Britain is one of the biggest exporters to Turkey. They call it ‘waste colonialism’, and no longer can we just send out our toxicities to the rest of the world.
“We cannot continue with creating this enormous tide of plastic. This is a scandal hiding in plain sight and we cannot turn a blind eye.”