Grapevine

Turkey's plan to recycle more has made life hard for its informal waste pickers

Turkey's 500,000 or so informal waste pickers carry out around 80% of the recycling in the country. These workers, who are also known as çekçekçi, are essential for separating out waste in a country where this is rarely done at source.

But their lives are precarious. Most of them are unregistered, lack social security, and have no access to basic services such as health care. And now they find themselves affected by efforts that formalize Turkey's waste management system.

Many of the workers are migrants. But large-scale immigration over recent years, particularly from conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Syria, has contributed to a rise in nationalistic sentiment throughout the country.

This has seen immigrants—and particularly waste pickers—portrayed in a negative fashion. Waste pickers have, for instance, been labeled "şehir eşkıyası" (urban bandits) by the media. And many people have argued that Turkiye's informal waste-picking practices should come to an end.

Yavuz Eroğlu, the president of a non-profit organization called PAGÇEV that promotes plastic recycling in Turkey, pointed out recently that the country's "real problem" is its informal waste collection system. In Eroğlu's view, informal waste picking impedes the effective scaling of recycling initiatives and prevents Turkey from improving its position in the global recycling market.