Recycling Waste Plastic: An Implementation of the Circular Economy Principles or Just Pollution Shift

As the demand for plastics increases, the international plastic waste trade has grown steeply during the last decades. Different studies have identified that plastic waste frequently travels from developed to developing/underdeveloped countries posing environmental burdens on them turning the issue into an environmental justice debate denoting the unequal distribution of social and environmental costs. With the recent implementation of China's waste import bans, different countries such as Turkey have become importers of large amounts of waste. From a Circular Economy (CE) perspective, this trade could be classified as an implementation of 9R principles, particularly in plastic recycling. However, the rapid change in waste flows in Turkey and the lack of waste management infrastructures have generated several problems in the economic, environmental, and social spheres of sustainability. Against this background, this paper analyses the plastic waste trade by employing a combined SWOT/ANP method to highlight the most important factors to reach an environmentally just recycling practice in line with the CE principles. After determining the main factors of the problem, a set of possible strategies were identified and evaluated. Preliminary findings indicate that mainstream practices i.e. recycling and reuse, are frequently classified as insufficient to reach a CE model that embraces an environmental justice perspective. Unless these approaches consider the matter holistically, material recovery ends up in shifting pollution to other countries, promoting a circular washing cycle and preventing the achievement of real sustainable development.