‘Big Clean’, the ‘Death Ship’ and the Hazardous Waste Trade between West Germany and Turkey, 1987–1988

Abstract

This article narrates the history of two high-profile West German-Turkish toxic waste scandals in 1988. It argues that they marked a watershed moment between two ‘waste regimes’. The first scandal showcased to the Turkish and West German publics how waste dealers and policy makers misleadingly packaged hazardous waste exports as a substitute for traditional forms of debt and as a vehicle for economic development. The opposition it fuelled hastened the demise of this waste regime by prompting the Turkish government to enact a ban on toxic waste imports. The second scandal revealed the new regime that emerged in its aftermath – one in which waste dealers and policy makers sought to evade new restrictions in the less visible margins of a changing regulatory and legal space.

Introduction

In November 1988, a columnist at Cumhuriyet, the newspaper of Turkey's republican establishment, wondered whether his country was becoming Western Europe's ‘garbage dump’.¹ This was certainly the impression left by two recent scandals that had fuelled a public debate in Turkey, West Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe about the desirability, legality and viability of a dangerous, often obscure area of commerce.² Turkey's recent transformation into one of the hot new markets for Western toxic waste exports might have resulted from the country's scant regulations and the growing pressures on businesses in Western Europe to dispose of hazardous refuse away from home.³ Yet, prior to the country's year of toxic waste obsession in 1988, waste traders had profited from operating largely in the shadows. As this article shows, the two scandals that brought toxic waste into public view in Turkey embodied what Gabrielle Hecht has termed a ‘material channel’ for global and transnational power – a form of ‘technopolitics’ that, in part by highlighting existing structures of power to an alarmed public, also provided the impetus for resistance and change.⁴ By casting light on what remained an opaque and wilfully disguised trade, these cases redefined how a variety of actors in West Germany and in Turkey understood, related to, and tolerated the hazardous waste trade.

The first of the two scandals presented in this article, centred on the so-called ‘Isparta cement factory’ or ‘Big Clean’ scandal in late 1987 and early 1988, introduces the overarching dynamics of, and the key actors involved in, the West German-Turkish trade. It shows how West German and Western European toxic waste dealers explicitly packaged their exports to Turkey as a novel form of economic development assistance and as a substitute for traditional forms of debt.⁵ Through their claims that entirely new products – tangible ones like ‘replacement fuel’ that could be used in factories and intangible ones like economic growth – would result from waste trading, dealers and even some politicians exploited the slippage between two divergent views of waste that encompassed both its economically productive and environmentally destructive dimensions.⁶ This process resulted from and helped define what Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez have described as waste's ‘formlessness or indeterminacy’ – a domain that occupied the ‘space between waste and value’.⁷ As a whole, the ‘Big Clean’ scandal highlights the connections and tensions between the allegedly beneficial permutations of toxic waste – as a supposed vehicle for economic development and as a substitute for debt – and the harm and devastation it threatened to unleash.

The second story, centred on the odyssey of the West German-flagged Petersberg cargo ship in the Marmara and Black Seas later in 1988, shows how corporate actors and Western European states like West Germany and Austria profited from a complex and often vague set of laws and regulations in order to circumvent whatever restrictions emerged – including the 1988 ban on toxic waste imports enacted by the Turkish government in response to the ‘Big Clean’ scandal. The Petersberg saga offered a Euro-Mediterranean parallel to the 1986 voyage of the Khian Sea, the ship carrying poisonous ash from the United States to various ports in the Caribbean that, as Emily Brownell has shown, came to exemplify how ‘ocean travel transformed waste into new things, both legitimately and surreptitiously’.⁸ The affair not only represented an early challenge to Turkey's recent ban on toxic waste imports; it also revealed how the complexity and invisibility of a fast-changing regulatory order prompted some policy makers and businesses to repurpose an ethically fraught trade to their own ends, in particular by attempting to identify and exploit new loopholes and legal grey areas.

The ‘Big Clean’ and Petersberg scandals occurred at, and helped created, a fracture point between two West German-Turkish ‘waste regimes’ – systems that, as Zsuzsa Gille has defined them, were shaped by the ‘social institutions and conventions that not only determine what wastes are considered valuable but also regulate their production and distribution’.⁹ They illustrate how West German industrial waste in Turkey was transformed over the course of one year from a politically tolerated (and even desirable) debt swap and vehicle for economic development into a prohibited domain that authorities in both states attempted to regulate. The ‘Big Clean’ scandal both illustrated the dynamics of the earlier waste regime to the West German and Turkish publics and hastened its demise, prompting waste dealers and policy makers to evade new restrictions in the less visible margins of a changing regulatory and legal space, as the ‘Death Ship’ affair showed.¹⁰

Together, these two illustrative cases explore how some of the key dynamics underlying the global toxic waste trade not only inflected relations between industrialised nations, between former colonies and metropoles, or between the West and the Eastern bloc.¹¹ Instead, by investigating the means used by West German waste exporters, West German and Turkish policy makers, and local Turkish officials to define and resist the shift in waste regimes of 1988, they show how this pivotal moment in the Euro-Mediterranean ‘Wasteocene’ shaped relations between central and peripheral parts of capitalist Europe.¹² To be sure, the West German-Turkish example was coloured by several of the defining characteristics identified by scholars of the global waste trade. It resulted from, and purported to remedy, the ‘differential development between countries’ that, as Iris Borowy has shown, lay at the root of the trade's origins in the 1970s and its rapid growth in the 1980s.¹³ It was understood in Turkish and West German media as a form of ‘garbage imperialism’, the organising device that David Pellow adopts in his account of how the global trade emerged as a result of stricter environmental regulations in industrialised states; the debt crisis among developing nations; the cost pressures imposed on firms by ‘economic globalisation’; and enduring ‘racist and classist culture and ideology’ that justified foisting toxic burdens on the less fortunate.¹⁴ At the same time, it exemplified what Rob Nixon has characterised as the ‘slow violence of the poor’ and was part of a related process that, as Traci Brynne Voyles has shown, has ‘wasted’ landscapes and livelihoods, nature and human beings (Voyles terms this ‘wastelanding’).¹⁵

In adapting global concepts to national and transnational realities, this article illustrates how, as scholars including Marco Armiero, Alison Frank Johnson, and Lise Fernanda Sedrez have argued, global phenomena can be enacted on local, regional, national and transnational scales.¹⁶ Specifically, the West German-Turkish case skirted the boundaries of, overlapped with, but remained distinct in important ways from broader international and global concepts. The West German-Turkish waste trade might have hewed to Ann Laura Stoler's definition of a ‘contemporary zone of imperial duress’, even if Turkey and West Germany were not linked by imperial ties, at least not in a formal sense and (by the 1980s) not in recent decades.¹⁷ German-Turkish relations were undoubtedly unequal – with Turkey reliant on West Germany for remittances (from Turkish guest workers) as its primary export market, and as one of its largest sources of foreign aid.¹⁸ Yet this transnational inequality was fundamentally different than that between former colonies and metropoles. Turkey was, in a sense, in Europe but not of Europe – a country whose ‘European’ vocation had been contested over decades and centuries but that remained institutionally anchored in the capitalist West as the bulwark of NATO's eastern flank and as an associate (and aspiring) member state of the European Economic Community (EEC).¹⁹ This ambiguity mattered, since the (relative) institutional equality between West Germany and Turkey helped channel Turkish opposition into the sphere of transnational legal and regulatory relations and, ultimately, placed the counter-offensive of waste dealers into the shadows and margins of regulatory reforms and legal loopholes.

As a whole, this article grapples with a system that was more than the sum of its parts. It was perceived to be (and clearly was) unequal and problematic, yet it was readily exploited by opportunistic toxic waste traders because of its complex, changing and polycentric nature, rather than because of any purposeful design on the part of policy makers. Power and intentionality were frequently discrepant forces in this story. While there is insufficient evidence to suggest that the trade resulted from any explicit plan on the part of West German policy makers to export the country's toxic waste, West German and Turkish officials alike were aware of and often complicit in perpetuating the trade's existence, even as it changed. This system might have reflected unequal power relations; yet it was defined by a logic that was neither purely intentional nor accidental – one in which the waste dealers were the primary actors, but were often (tacitly) aided and abetted by the very policy makers who openly expressed their desire to rein in this unseemly trade.²⁰ By examining the trade in the ways it was understood by disparate groups in Turkey and West Germany alike, this article reveals a changing system – on both sides of the 1988 shift in waste regimes – whose morally problematic existence was facilitated by its complex, opaque and frequently indecipherable character. Particularly in the face of rapid change, this very opacity opened up new avenues of resistance, but did so in a way that was accessible to all, including the waste dealers themselves.

‘Big Clean’

To Turkish commentators, the country's emerging position as a destination for hazardous substances from Western Europe highlighted how, as they fell victim to what was roundly criticised in Turkey and elsewhere as ‘garbage colonialism’ (çöp kolonyalizmi), the former Ottoman heartlands had become the object of a new type of foreign influence that was eerily reminiscent of older forms of informal colonial domination.²¹ If the waste trade highlighted the developmental divide between West Germany and Turkey to Turkish journalists and politicians, West German waste dealers explicitly claimed to help Turkey overcome it with a novel form of economic development assistance, as Turkey's signal toxic waste scandal of late 1987 and 1988 would reveal.

The scandal emerged from a project overseen by the aptly if accidentally named Big Clean (Büyüktemiz) company, which was part of the group that K. A. Gourlay identified in the early 1990s as the central actors of the toxic waste trade – an assemblage of actors that comprised ‘middlemen, the entrepreneurs, adventurers or corruptible politicians who are prepared to organize the collection, shipping, importation and ultimate disposal of the waste’.²² Büyüktemiz was merely the surname of the family that owned the business, rather than its (supposed) purpose, a darkly ironic twist on the cliché that, for some, a name is destiny.²³ The family patriarch, Mehmet Büyüktemiz, was a Turkish lieutenant who worked for the West German air force at a NATO radar station near Kütahya, a small town in the Western Anatolian interior known in Turkey for its porcelain production. A soldier with a foreboding, cowboy-like presence who, according to one report, marched around with a pistol in a holster, Büyüktemiz had shifted his attention in recent years from air defence against communist invaders to the toxic waste trade, generally dumping imported refuse in decommissioned coal mines.²⁴

The ‘Big Clean’ proposal highlighted the straightforward, if problematic, logic behind shipping waste to Turkey: rural Anatolia needed to be industrialised, and industrialisation required capital.²⁵ Foreign aid provided one solution to this problem, but the demand for capital outstripped the supply of development assistance, particularly at a time of stagnant and even declining Western aid budgets.²⁶ In response, the firm and its Western European partners devised a workaround. The Büyüktemiz company, which was owned by the Büyüktemiz family together with the Turkish government and a West German engineering group, would source toxic waste from West German industry – particularly from states like Baden-Württemberg that were home to only a limited number of disposal facilities.²⁷ The revenues resulting from toxic waste receipts would then be used to finance the Göltaş cement factory outside the southwestern city of Isparta and to build a ‘special disposal facility’ in the Western Anatolian town of Tavşanlı, in Kütahya province. This occurred, moreover, at a time when Turkey was not only increasingly indebted and reliant on foreign capital investment, but when the country's waste regime was beginning to embark on a shift from a more informal system to one that relied on larger, more formal dumping sites.²⁸ As part of this process, not unlike marginalised areas across the globe, cheap land values and low population density in Western Anatolia attracted waste exporters who packaged their product as a promissory note and vehicle for investment.²⁹

The details of the Tavşanlı-Isparta project were self-servingly technical and opaque, but the pitch to local politicians was straightforward. The cement factory in Isparta wasn't the project's ultimate goal; instead, it was merely an intermediate step towards the construction of a much larger ‘transformer factory’, which would create 2,000 much-needed local jobs.³⁰ Büyüktemiz’s partners on the export side were Faktum and Weber, the Swiss and West German companies that sourced ‘sellers’ of toxic waste among industrial concerns in Central and Western Europe (though, in financial terms, they were buyers since they paid to offload their waste). Besides acting as intermediaries, Faktum and Weber also contributed to the developmentalist credentials of the project. They boasted of an investment package worth ‘billions of dollars’ that would act as a catalyst to industrialise poor inland areas of southwestern Anatolia.³¹ To lend credibility, Faktum, the waste exporter, masqueraded as an investor in industrial development, not just as a buyer and seller of industrial waste. The company's CEO, Wolfgang Honold, later claimed to West German authorities that his firm's primary role was to help Western European countries build factories and outsource operations to developing countries in order to reduce costs and help bring prosperity to foreign lands. At Isparta, Faktum's clients had hired the company to lay the groundwork for a tractor factory (the story about what type of factory would be built, and even where, changed frequently), which was to be ‘transferred’ from central Europe to western Anatolia, alongside a coal liquefaction plant belonging to a ‘large petrochemical company’.³²

In Faktum's misleading account, building a toxic waste dump would help Turkish officials overcome two stumbling blocks on the path to building the transformer factory (or tractor or cement or coal liquefaction plant). First, industrial sites generated waste, and a large factory couldn't be built responsibly without first designing local disposal facilities. Second, since capital-intensive industrial sites in poor agricultural areas tended not to be an attractive prospect for commercial banks, obtaining sufficient (hard currency) financing would be challenging. Building a toxic waste dump promised to solve both problems at once. It would ensure that there was a final resting place for the refuse generated by the factory that was promised (but never built). More importantly, in the short term, it would also plug the financing gap, since the fees generated by West German waste exports would provide the hard currency that the project might otherwise never obtain. Faktum would import non-radioactive toxic waste from abroad, store it briefly, and dump it in facilities built with the revenue from foreign ‘waste disposal fees’.³³ Faktum's explanation was undoubtedly self-serving, but it was also compelling. Turkish politicians were desperate for industrial jobs and were searching for alternatives to traditional lending at a time of mounting debt.³⁴

Toxic waste, in Faktum's vision, replaced old-fashioned loans: rather than agreeing to pay back West German lenders, the Turks would merely have to accept staggering quantities of West German waste. Weber, the West German waste exporter, would collect the waste from various German industrial firms and repackage it as ‘fuel’. To do so, it had signed an agreement with the Turkish authorities, and had obtained a special export licence from the local authorities in the town of Göppingen, to export 100,000 tons of West German industrial waste to a 200,000 square-meter dump site between fall 1987 and the end of the decade.³⁵ The scale of the (real) waste dwarfed the illusory, promised factory it was supposed to serve. Together, Büyüktemiz and Weber were laying the groundwork to export refuse roughly equivalent in weight to 250 jumbo jets or ten Eiffel Towers, to a site the size of New York's Grand Central Station.³⁶

The Faktum-Weber-Büyüktemiz sales pitch was couched in the supposed normalcy of the export business conducted by companies who boasted highly ‘reputable’ credentials – ‘reputable’ in the sense that their priorities and values made them trustworthy to investors in Western Europe. Weber Industry and City Cleaning helped major West German corporations like Siemens, Bosch, and Daimler Benz dispose of their industrial waste. The company claimed that its export product consisted solely in ‘recyclable materials’ (Wertstoff) and boasted to authorities that it was even being paid by its Turkish business partners for its supposedly valuable export (the latter claim appears to have reflected an accounting sleight of hand).³⁷ Büyüktemiz also traded on the legitimacy afforded by its exclusive license, obtained from the Turkish authorities, to import any sort of non-radioactive waste originating in Western Europe or North America to the Tavşanlı waste site (and to store the waste in the company's warehouse at the Izmir harbour during transit).³⁸ As the officially endorsed Turkish steward of the project, Büyüktemiz was responsible not only for running the disposal facilities, but also for importing, transporting and disposing of the waste, or for selling it on to other dealers in Turkey. As Semra Büyüktemiz, the family matriarch, nonchalantly characterised her business to a journalist, this was a trade like any other: ‘we import waste and chemical waste from Europe, especially from [West] Germany … [and] we process it and use it in coal production’.³⁹ Büyüktemiz, Weber, and Faktum also relied on one other ‘reputable’ firm. The West German group, EVA, one of the oldest waste exporters in Europe (which began exporting West German waste to France in 1952), would both contribute to the ‘replacement fuel’ (i.e. it would export waste) and act as a financial intermediary for the resulting payments. According to Turkish newspaper reports, EVA had agreed to pay an undisclosed fee, via Büyüktemiz, to the final recipients of the waste in Turkey (which in some but not all cases would have been Büyüktemiz itself).⁴⁰

In the autumm of 1987, with no sign of hard hats or earth movers, Weber sent an initial shipment of around 1500 tons of euphemistically named ‘replacement fuel’ (Ersatzbrennstoff) from its base in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg to the cement factory at Isparta, where the ‘fuel’ would be burned (or disposed of).⁴¹ The project erupted into a scandal in Turkey and West Germany when it became clear that toxic waste was the sole purpose of the project, not an intermediate step in the service of building a factory and creating industrial jobs. In February 1988 a joint investigation undertaken by West German journalists working for the Tageszeitung (TAZ), a newspaper close to the Green Party, and Turkish journalists at Cumhuriyet unearthed the unsettling reality beneath the project's official veneer.⁴² The harmless-sounding ‘replacement fuel’ being used at the cement factory was actually composed of toxic waste, including cyanide and the chlorine-derived poisons dichloromethane and dichloroethylene. If they were handled improperly, they could easily produce the lethal dioxin 2,4,5-t.⁴³ The Tavşanlı factory also emitted levels of PCBs that were six times higher than commonly accepted international limits and almost thirty times greater than West Germany's more stringent (and recently adopted) standard.⁴⁴ Equally troubling, Weber appeared to have been drawn to Turkey by the country's ‘heavenly conditions for the disposal of toxic waste’.⁴⁵ The head of the factory, Yilmaz Kasap, was especially blunt when he noted to a Cumhuriyet journalist that ‘the Germans were overly sensitive about pollution … [and] even have a party called the “Greens”’. Turkey, on the other hand, was (in Kasap's words) a ‘backwards developing country’ that didn't need to trouble itself with the finer points of environmental protection.⁴⁶ What had attracted Weber to Turkey was painfully obvious to Istanbul's self-proclaimed ‘garbage king’, Osman Söyler. Söyler was adamant that, if the Isparta waste were as harmless as its West German exporters claimed, they wouldn't have exported it in the first place.⁴⁷ The ‘replacement fuel’ label was a ruse.

Nevertheless, it was a lie coated in a veneer of safety and legality. At least in theory, West Germany didn't allow the country's companies simply to foist their toxic refuse on foreigners. Indeed, the West German federal government's official policy was that waste had to be dealt with at home, unless absolutely necessary – as was the case in states like Baden-Württemberg in the southwest that lacked sufficient disposal capabilities.⁴⁸ Waste exports were to be reserved for ‘exceptional’ cases.⁴⁹ The problem was that this exception pierced a gaping hole in the entire regulatory framework, since it made an illegal practice perfectly legal under the right circumstances – and numerous firms were adept at identifying such exceptions. While some West German firms became experts at finding loopholes, others flouted the rules entirely, since ‘uncontrolled and unprofessional disposal’ abroad was cheaper and easier than disposing of it at home.⁵⁰ There was little question as to who would win when savvy traders were pitted against a verification process that relied, essentially, on the honour system.

At the same time, West German legality in the domain of toxic waste exports was a fiction created and reinforced in part by the Turkish authorities’ lax enforcement of its own rules. The local regulatory office in Göppingen (in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg), for instance, had certified Weber's ‘replacement fuel’ export based on the assumption that the Isparta cement factory was able to burn it safely and effectively. Without this assurance, Weber's export from West Germany would have been illegal. This assumption concerning the factory's disposal capabilities, in turn, was based on documents tendered to the Göppingen office by the Isparta Chamber of Commerce, which, however, merely reflected Büyüktemiz’s own false assertions. It later emerged that the factory lacked the facilities to purify any of its own emissions or waste products – not just toxic ones.⁵¹ When tested by scientists at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, the plant's emissions turned out to contain high levels of PCBs and other contaminants that would not have been present if the appropriate purification facilities had been available.⁵² On the Turkish side, the Isparta Chamber's faith in the project was bolstered by Büyüktemiz’s promise that the company's facilities would not only follow Turkish law but would also meet all ‘German, European and American’ environmental and public health standards (a category so broad as to be meaningless), as certified by an internationally recognised team of experts.⁵³ The West German legal export, authorised by the local office in Göppingen, in short, was not only based on doctored documents and false authorisations provided by the Turkish authorities; it was rooted in a chain of questionable claims that ultimately originated with Büyüktemiz itself.⁵⁴

As a result of the scandal unleashed by the Tageszeitung-Cumhuriyet investigation, the regional authorities of Kütahya revoked the factory's operating licence in early March 1988.⁵⁵ Their justification was that the Turkish authorities had been ‘knowingly misled’ into accepting thirty-five tons of toxic waste on a trial basis in September 1987, followed by another 1581 tons in December 1987.⁵⁶ Fevzi Coşkun, the mayor of Tavşanlı, the town that hosted the Büyüktemiz disposal facility, lamented that he had been betrayed and defrauded.⁵⁷ Büyüktemiz, Faktum, and Weber were equally outraged, though for diametrically opposed reasons. Wolfgang Honold, Faktum's CEO, wondered out loud whether the Turkish authorities ‘understood Turkish’, since ‘the Turks [had] granted us a general import license, to import special waste [Sondermüll] of any type in unlimited quantities, excluding radioactive material’. As agreed, the West Germans hadn't exported any radioactive waste, so what was the problem? Didn't the Turks still want to host the ‘industrial megaproject’ that had supposedly been sponsored by the ‘highest levels’ of the West German government – a claim that the project's boosters never abandoned?⁵⁸ Dieter Weber feigned confusion as to why toxic waste exports had been singled out from the country's other exports to Turkey: ‘we [Germans] export Daimler and BMW [cars and trucks] to Turkey, so why not “replacement fuel from special waste”’?⁵⁹ Exports were exports.

The scandal also had more far-reaching consequences. In the region of Isparta, the cement factory saga prompted a debate about the toxic effects of economic development in a country that had long been dependent on the West for capital and technology. The affair provided supporters of Prime Minister Turgut Özal's market-friendly, neoliberal Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi) with a moral high horse on matters of industrial safety, despite its welcoming attitude towards foreign investment and multinational corporations. Özal, one of the principal architects of Turkey's pro-business, neoliberal turn following the country's 1980 military coup, became personally involved and attempted to isolate the waste scandal from his government's openness towards foreign capital.⁶⁰ The problem, he argued, wasn't the system; it was a handful of criminals, whom he would bring to justice. After visiting the cement factory, Özal insisted to the mayor of Isparta that the toxic waste be removed from the city and burned elsewhere. His involvement, those close to him suggested, was sufficient to solve the problem. Helpfully to the Turkish authorities, it also justified police removal of environmentalist protesters from near the site: if the prime minister was taking care of the matter, there was no need for demonstrations.⁶¹

In a public forum in Isparta in late February 1988, dubbed the ‘garbage debate’ (çöp tartışması) by Turkish media, the local members of Özal's party used the scandal to score political points at the expense of one of their main political opponents, the Demirel family. It was helpful to Özal that Şevket Demirel had not only approved the project as head of the Isparta Chamber of Commerce, but that he also happened to be the brother of former Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel, the current general president of the opposition, centre-right Democrat Party. The Motherland Party's local representatives grilled Şevket Demirel, asking why he hadn't favoured removing the waste from the Isparta region and then destroying it. Did he condone poisoning people? The responses from Demirel's party colleagues highlighted the official thinking behind Turkey's toxic waste imports. Importing garbage was a justified ‘economic practice’ (ekonomik bir uygulama) and the plant was able to process the fuel without damage to the local environment. In this rendering, the saga was indeed emblematic of the system as a whole – but the whole affair, like the system it was part of, was ‘no problem for Isparta’.⁶² This skilful tactical move placed Demirel's party into an awkward position: in order to defend their role as stewards of the scandal-plagued Isparta cement factory (since Şevket had supplied false documentation to obtain the export approval from the West German authorities), they also had to justify an entire system of openness to foreign capital that was part and parcel of Özal's neoliberal reforms.

As the scandal intensified, Veysel Atasoy, the Turkish minister of state responsible for the environment, filed criminal charges on the grounds that the import certifications were imprecise. Atasoy summed up the prevailing mood to reporters: ‘we don't want garbage from [West Germany]’. The mayor of Istanbul, Dalan, also asserted that ‘we're not a dump for German toxic waste . . . everyone should deal with their own garbage’.⁶³ The Environment Ministry in Baden-Württemberg, where Weber was based and where much if not all of the waste originated, acknowledged that the southwestern state's important ‘Turkey [waste] export’ was in crisis. The scandal had shown that Baden-Württemberg needed to build new facilities, including an incineration plant, to dispose of its own toxic waste without relying on exports to places like Turkey.⁶⁴

The public outrage surrounding the Isparta scandal swiftly put an end to Turkey's (legal) involvement in the toxic waste trade, since it led the Turkish Parliament to ban the import of ‘all types of industrial waste’ on 3 March 1988.⁶⁵ As the Turkish, West German, and Austrian publics were to discover in the summer of 1988, however, the new Turkish law didn't end the toxic waste trade, but merely pushed it underground, thanks to a loophole that continued to allow the import of household garbage (a trade that continues to thrive in the 2020s). Turkey had merely banned industrial waste – and had implemented a ‘warning system’ that required importers to sign an attestation declaring that their cargo would not be considered environmentally harmful in its home country.⁶⁶ This new honour system was, unsurprisingly, no match for savvy waste dealers like Büyüktemiz. As the Turkish state minister responsible for the environment, Adnan Kahveci, was well aware, Turkey's efforts to prevent the import of toxic waste continued to be thwarted by the international ‘garbage mafia’ (çöp mafya) that had been exposed at the Tavşanlı cement factory.⁶⁷ Even after the failure of the Isparta cement factory project, Büyüktemiz continued to find foreign clients and operate disposal facilities in Anatolia, despite the greater scrutiny, political attention and legal action that the toxic waste trade now attracted.

The St. Florian Principle and a ‘Death Ship’ in the Black Sea

In a spectacular case that quickly devolved into an international incident in the summer of 1988, Turkey's new ‘warning system’ left a West German freighter adrift in the Black Sea. The Petersberg was a relatively small, somewhat decrepit vessel that had been chartered from the Danish Nielsen shipping company and subsequently rented out to the Bavarian Lloyd of Regensburg (which, in turn, belonged to the large West German energy consortium Veba).⁶⁸ It had been commissioned by a Viennese waste exporter, Reinhard Göschl, to transport around 1200 tons of waste from a construction site outside Vienna down the Danube, across the Black Sea and through the Bosphorus to the Turkish port city of Izmit, along the Marmara coast near Istanbul.⁶⁹ In mid-May, a Nielsen shipping agent loaded the ship with this ‘contaminated soil’ in the Vienna harbour.⁷⁰ On 18 May, the ship's captain, Günter Großjahn, who owned and operated the Petersberg, set sail down the Danube en route to Turkey.⁷¹ Upon its arrival in the Turkish port of Derince, near Izmit on the Marmara Sea, the ship was boarded by customs and dock officials, and sequestered on suspicion of carrying radioactive waste. Its intended recipient, Büyüktemiz, refused to accept the cargo, although it soon became apparent that Büyüktemiz might have raised a red flag when it failed to file the necessary paper work (or neglected to bribe the right officials, in one account).⁷² The firms that had sold the cargo to Büyüktemiz were Faktum, which, like Büyüktemiz, had also been involved in the Isparta affair, and another waste exporter, Nobila.⁷³ While Büyüktemiz himself would end up in jail for fraud over the course of the summer of 1988, the Petersberg affair was not a story of justice served.⁷⁴ Instead, the stranded vessel showcased how savvy actors like Büyüktemiz, his Western business associates, and even European states like West Germany and Austria were able to exploit the complexity of overlapping legal jurisdictions and the unknowability of their cargoes to circumvent the attempts of states like Turkey to ban hazardous imports.⁷⁵

After its arrival at the Marmara port of Derince, the Petersberg's cargo appeared to be trapped on the ship – and couldn't be transported, as planned, to a Büyüktemiz disposal site in central Turkey.⁷⁶ In early June, Turkish officials accused the ship's owner of illicitly transporting radioactive materials. Shortly thereafter, the story leaked to the Turkish press, which reported that the test results obtained by an Istanbul laboratory had revealed that the waste was radioactive.⁷⁷ Just months after the Isparta scandal, Turkey had become the recipient of more unwanted toxic waste from West Germany, which now sat on an anchored ‘death ship’ (ölüm gemi), as local newspapers dubbed the Petersberg.⁷⁸ Were the Germans, beset by anxieties over atomic energy, now trying to dump the refuse from their nuclear plants in Turkey? Confronted with this chilling prospect, the customs authorities ordered the ship to leave the country immediately.⁷⁹

West German and Western European officials were blindsided by what they deemed an irrational and hysterical reaction.⁸⁰ They claimed that the cargo's radiation levels, as revealed by the Istanbul test, were 140 Becquerel (Bq) per kilogram, less than half the EEC's upper limit for baby food (370 Bq/kg) and far less radioactive than Viennese cobblestones were in 1988 (1000 Bq/kg).⁸¹ Indeed, these readings were similar to the (elevated) radiation levels found in Austrian and German soil two years after the Chernobyl disaster. West German officials thus considered them to be ‘harmless’.⁸² The Turkish authorities were now applying a more stringent threshold for radioactive contamination than did West Germany, Austria or the EEC. Europe had become literally more radioactive because of Chernobyl, and in the aftermath of the Isparta scandal the Turks appeared unwilling to tolerate Chernobyl-tainted Viennese soil.

As the subsequent international incident over the Petersberg showed, however, the question was never really about how radioactive Viennese cobblestones were. Instead, it concerned the unknowability of waste shipments, which were not just physically hidden in the cargo holds of freighters but were disguised by overlapping and often contradictory categories of legal ownership and liability. When the Petersberg attempted to return to Austria in late June, it became trapped in the Black Sea after it was disowned by the Austrian government and subsequently barred transit rights along the Danube.⁸³ The Viennese authorities disclaimed responsibility based on their assessment that the ship itself was (West) German, not Austrian; its problems therefore belonged to Bonn, regardless of the provenance of its cargo.⁸⁴ The West Germans, on the other hand, argued that the problem was the cargo, not the vessel: West Germany wasn't willing to take responsibility for disposing of Austrian waste simply because it happened to be on a German ship.⁸⁵

It remained unclear what would happen to the Petersberg, which spent the summer of 1988 stranded in the Black Sea. Food, water and sanitary supplies were running low, and the old vessel began to encounter serious mechanical problems.⁸⁶ The looming fall storms posed an existential threat to the ship and its human occupants.⁸⁷ Moreover, the ship's captain had almost run out of money, although, given that the Petersberg's predicament was that nobody wanted its cargo, it was unclear what a bankruptcy would actually entail. A high-ranking Soviet diplomat in Bonn shared his fear with the West German Environment Ministry that, given the deteriorating conditions on board, the ship's captain might attempt to dump his radioactive cargo at sea.⁸⁸ The West German authorities, meanwhile, feared that the ship would be seized – though it was debatable whether anyone would want to take ownership of what had become, literally, a toxic asset.⁸⁹

The solution that the Austrians began to pursue in autumn 1988 was, at this point, a predictable one – they tried to make the cargo someone else's problem, exactly as the Turks had accused West Germany of doing earlier in the year. Confronted with repeated West German refusals to accept the Petersberg's ‘Austrian’ charge, the Austrian authorities opened negotiations with Egypt and East Germany as possible destinations.⁹⁰ To one Austrian journalist, though, this proposal wasn't just impractical (since the ship's mechanical state made a long journey impossible) but also highlighted how the country's environmental policy seemed to follow an old Austrian proverb known as the ‘Florian’ principle. Named after St. Florian, the saint who protected against fire and drought, the ironically named proverb referred to the self-centred human tendency, when confronted with an existential threat, to ask St. Florian to ‘save my house, and burn down my neighbour's’. Austria, like its larger neighbour to the west, had adapted this principle to its environmental problems. Like West Germany, Austria was able to play the ‘model environmental pupil’ by exporting its most flagrant environmental hazards abroad. Austria and West Germany had been complicit in doing just that with the Petersberg's cargo when a West German company transported Austrian waste to Turkey, and they both sought out a similar solution, though in different locations, after Turkey blocked its import.⁹¹

Unsurprisingly, the significance of the Petersberg affair varied depending on which side of St. Florian's ledger a country found itself. To officials from Austria and West Germany, the most pressing questions concerned the political ramifications of corporate ownership, liability and jurisdictional problems. Given that there was no precedent in international law for toxic waste incidents like this, just non-binding guidelines issued by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in 1982, it was unclear which legal principles would apply, and on what grounds.⁹² What responsibility should be borne by Faktum, Göschl, Nielsen Shipping, or the Bavarian Lloyd?⁹³ More importantly, what about the states in which these firms were based? The West Germans and Austrians alike exploited this ambiguity. To the authorities in Bonn, the UNEP's guidelines implied that, in a dispute concerning hazardous waste, the country of origin should accept the waste's return. Vienna countered that the UNEP directive merely provided non-binding guidance. In this exchange, it was revealing that only the intended recipients (and potential victims) of the trade in Turkey divined moral clarity from this legal ambiguity. From the Turkish perspective, German-Austrian wrangling over jurisdictional questions highlighted how international jurisprudence favoured industrialised nations and saddled the structurally weaker party, Turkey, with the toxic waste. To the Turkish minister of state responsible for the environment, Adnan Kahveci, the Petersberg affair illustrated the total impotence of the Turkish state in the face of a powerful international ‘waste mafia’ – a mafia that was aided and abetted by the efforts of West German and Austrian authorities to shoulder any other country with responsibility.⁹⁴

In early November 1988, after the Petersberg had been at sea for five months, the Austrians and West Germans finally came to an agreement to end the saga (a deal from which, tellingly, Turkey was excluded). The Bavarian Lloyd would cover the previous transport costs of 7 million Austrian shillings (roughly US$600,000) while the Austrian state would provide a guarantee of an additional 7 million shillings to ensure the disposal of the waste. Vienna would thus contribute financially to the elimination of the toxic cargo, without specifying where exactly this would take place, since the final destination was carefully removed from the public spotlight (and official record). This solution appeased Bonn but led to outrage in Austria, where newspaper editorialists accused the government of using taxpayers' money to bail out waste dealers. To many observers, in Austria and elsewhere, the affair left several open questions. Why had Vienna allowed the private interests of toxic waste exporters to place important international relationships at risk? If the cargo truly was no more harmful than Viennese cobblestones, as both the Germans and Austrians claimed, why did the West German and Austrian authorities go to such lengths to offload it onto others?⁹⁵ Was there something materially toxic in the Petersberg's hold, or did the row merely showcase the efforts of wealthy states like West Germany and Austria to create the political structures and legal precedents that would ultimately offload environmental problems onto poorer nations? To be sure, the story was puzzling in some respects. The intransigence of policy makers in Bonn and Vienna undermined Austrian claims about harmless construction waste – unless, of course, what the Austrians and West Germans were actually trying to protect was a legal system designed to outsource liability and damage, a toxic legal reality rather than a poisonous material one.

Turkish reactions betrayed the lingering suspicion that their country had fallen victim to an international conspiracy, mounted by toxic waste dealers and enabled by national policies and international agreements that originated among, and were designed to serve the interests of, industrialised nations. Rumours circulated in the Turkish press that powerful foreign interests had prevented Turkish authorities from boarding and inspecting the ‘death ship’, even when it was in Turkish waters. The suggestion was that waste exporters from places like West Germany and Austria were able to evade Turkish regulations precisely because they had the power to do so, thanks to their significant financial and political capital. Moreover, they did so in a manner, on boats just off Turkish shores, that was suggestively similar to the extra-legal spaces occupied by the European traders who had once dominated trade at Turkish ports thanks to the Ottoman-era capitulations.⁹⁶ Foreign exporters and shady Turkish dealers like Büyüktemiz pocketed the profits at the expense of the health of the Turkish people, the integrity of the Turkish environment, and the ability of the Turkish state to protect its borders from hazardous incursions. The Petersberg scandal revealed the many limitations faced by national, regional and local officials in developing nations – and how the supposed legal constraints faced by industrialised countries ultimately worked to the detriment of their poorer neighbours.⁹⁷ It also highlighted the scale of the problem. Although the Petersberg was stopped, surely, many in Turkey suspected, there were countless other ‘death ships’ that arrived undetected.

To Turks and Germans alike, the Petersberg affair epitomised a new type of international economic order that was emblematic of global capitalism in the late 1980s.⁹⁸ Developing countries might attempt to protect themselves from environmental intrusions, as Turkey had done, but they would continue to face numerous imported hazards, in large part because of the regulatory holes and shadows that were exploited in different ways by waste traders and states alike. Indeed, by adding to the complexity of the trade, attempts to curtail it merely created new business opportunities for savvy operators like Faktum, Weber and Büyüktemiz – and new moral hiding places for government officials in industrialised nations. Since Turkey continued to import Western European garbage even after banning toxic waste, exporters remained able to classify their refuse as being ‘non-industrial’, as the Petersberg's owners and sponsors had done. Not unlike the way investment banks sold toxic financial assets to unwitting buyers in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic waste dealers of the late 1980s profited from their operation's impenetrability.

If only unintentionally, the Petersberg affair had exposed the inner workings of a system that typically benefited waste traders, even if it hadn't in this particular case (though West Germany and Austria did succeed in keeping the waste from returning to its country of origin); it was the exception that proved the rule. Although the Petersberg became stranded, the waste dealers were generally helped rather than hindered by their ability to shuffle, in this case, between the legal jurisdictions and physical spaces of two exporting states (West Germany and Austria), two importing countries (Austria and Turkey), and multiple transit points. As the West German weekly newspaper Die Zeit noted in 1988, this ‘blossoming and expanding trade’ exploited the grey areas between open criminality and legal loopholes, relied on cash payments, avoided putting things in writing and hid behind various shell companies.⁹⁹ The Petersberg affair revealed how difficult it was to police a trade in which a ship that was legally domiciled in the northern German port of Eckernförde despite being physically based in Vienna might be owned by one West German company and operated by another, all while working together with at least three West German, Swiss and Turkish waste dealers. Together, the ‘Big Clean’ scandals of 1988 and the Petersberg affair were part of a new category of Western capitalism that was rooted not just in moving and hiding, but in commodifying and disguising, the dirtiest by-products of industrial production.

Epilogue

In the late 1980s, calls to end the toxic waste trade escalated in Western Europe and across the globe – and resulted in a global ban on toxic waste exports in March 1989. The signing on 22 March 1989 of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was a momentous occasion, since, as the West German Minister of the Environment noted, the convention would finally put an end to the ‘rampant, uncontrolled “waste tourism”’ of the 1980s.¹⁰⁰ Just as its basic form mirrored the Turkish law passed one year earlier, the limitations of the Basel Convention were foreshadowed in different ways by the Isparta and Petersberg affairs. The Isparta scandal had highlighted the ability of savvy businesses to brand the waste trade as a form of economic development by preying on the need for hard currency and hopes for a better future; and the ongoing economic justifications for the trade continued after 1989 as well. More pressingly, the Petersberg story had demonstrated that savvy dealers would continue to exploit loopholes and grey areas as long as the underlying economic incentives remained in place – and there was no sign that these incentives had simply disappeared when the Basel Convention was drafted.¹⁰¹

Instead, the public outcry over the toxic waste export scandals in the late 1980s, together with the signing of the Basel Convention, ratcheted up the pressure on West German and Western European industry to find dumping sites closer to home. If waste went outward in the 1980s, toward the European periphery, across the Iron Curtain and to the Global South, in the 1990s it was redirected to Europe's post-industrial landscapes. Margaret Thatcher's wave of deregulation and privatisation turned a deindustrialising United Kingdom into Western Europe's toxic waste dump.¹⁰² Almost immediately after reunification, the German federal government in Bonn began to discuss plans to build Europe's largest portfolio of toxic waste disposal sites in decommissioned coal mines in the East.¹⁰³ Using a newly domestic region as a toxic waste dump was a readapted version of the global trade of the 1980s. It would provide German industry with an escape hatch for a new era, at a domestic disposal site that wouldn't fall foul of environmentalist pressures or the West Germany's Basel Convention commitments. And it did so in the territory of a former state, East Germany, that took in Western European toxic waste in the 1980s in exchange for much-needed hard currency, much like Turkey and states in the Global South had done, only this state had now been absorbed into a reunified Germany.

At the same time, the export trade didn't merely disappear after the late 1980s. If the destination of toxic waste shifted, the underlying dynamics remained in place for forms of waste that were not considered to be dangerous industrial by-products. Indeed, for decades Turkey continued to receive shipments of German household garbage, including large amounts of environmentally damaging but notionally non-toxic plastics. Several decades after the Petersberg had left the Black Sea, a sequel was enacted, as a freighter carrying 141 shipping containers replete with plastic waste left the port of Hamburg in November 2020, en route to various Turkish ports. In response to a phenomenon that was once again dubbed ‘waste colonialism’, Turkey subsequently enacted (and then rescinded) a ban on plastic imports in early 2021. As a result, these containers were left stranded for around a year, before they were eventually disposed of in Vietnam.¹⁰⁴

The dizzying growth and reach of the global toxic waste trade in the 1980s shows how the problem of hazardous industrial refuse had come to symbolise a much wider set of concerns at the nexus of the economy and the environment. It was a vivid illustration of the environmental, material and health consequences of global inequalities. The Turkish-German waste scandals of 1988 revealed how older forms of political and economic dependency between the European core and periphery were repurposed to the exigencies of the ‘Wasteocene’, and how the desperation born out of poverty and subjugation could quite literally be toxic. Indeed, if West German toxic waste exporters purposefully exploited the pathways of economic development and dependency connecting poorer nations to richer ones, one of the consequences of these stories was a redefinition of these concepts. To be ‘developed’ and ‘advanced’ increasingly implied the ability not just to produce advanced industrial goods, as had long been the case, but to avoid living alongside its toxic detritus – and to determine where this refuse would ultimately end up. It was this elusive control over poisonous materials that, as this article has shown, seemed to follow only the logic of a complex system in flux, rather than bending to the aspirations of any given institution or group.