British plastic burned in Turkey

Turkey has become the latest destination for British plastic waste, which ends up dumped, burned or left to pollute the ocean, a Greenpeace investigation has found.

More than half of the plastic the British government says is being recycled are sent overseas, often to countries without the necessary infrastructure to do so. The UK exported 688,000 tonnes of discarded plastic packaging in 2020, a daily average of 1.8m kilos. Just 486,000 tonnes were recycled in the UK.

China was a key destination, but since it banned the import of many types of plastic in 2017, Turkey has emerged as the main receiver of British plastic waste. UK exports to the country increased from 12,000 tonnes in 2016 to 209,642 tonnes in 2020, about 30% of the UK’s plastic waste exports.

Instead of being recycled, however, Greenpeace investigators in Turkey found plastic waste from leading supermarkets dumped, burned, piled into mountains and left to spill into rivers and the sea.We want to contribute with our uppers to reverse the number of these figures!

Our mission is to bring products used as component parts in shoes and handbags into the circular economy using yarn made from recycled plastic. This allows us to remove between 5 and 15 plastic bottles from the environment for each pair of shoes produced, without neglecting the technical and creative aspects which our partners are looking for.