Tonnes of plastic packaging from popular British supermarkets like Sainsbury's and French frozen food retailer Picard is illegally dumped in Turkey, the top destination for European waste, AFP reported on December 12.

Illegally dumped plastic waste is visible at a growing number of sites in southern Turkey. There are at least 10 known sites.

AFP visited three last month. A reporting team came across a fourth by chance after discovering a load of waste dumped on the side of a road in southern Adana province.

Piled in mounds or strewn in ditches, plastic waste from the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands was identified by AFP.

"European citizens need to know this: the last stop for their waste that they carefully separate into different boxes is not a recycling facility," Sedat Gundogdu, a professor at Cukurova University in Adana, told the news agency.

"It's here where there are mountains of waste."

As Western Europe pays for the waste to be taken away, there is a financial temptation for Turkish firms that import it to dump it rather than pay to recycle it.

Interpol warned in August about the rising involvement of criminal organisations in the global illegal plastic waste trade.

Despite its green aspirations, the EU still recycles less than a third of its plastic waste, burning or burying the rest. It only recycles half of that third itself, sending the remainder abroad.

Turkey became Europe's go-to destination for plastic waste after China began to close its doors to foreign waste from January 2018.

Monthly imports of plastic waste from Europe leapt by more than tenfold from 2016 to 2019, according to Eurostat data, with Turkey taking in nearly a quarter of what the EU exported last year.

Britain led the way by far, accounting for over a quarter by itself.

Some of the illegally dumped waste ends up in Turkey’s rivers that empty into the Mediterranean Sea, with the plastic washing up on Turkish beaches.

"We come across single-use plastics the most in the seas," said Greenpeace Mediterranean's plastics project director Nihan Temiz Atas, who called for a ban on the use of such plastics.

Turkey was the top destination for waste exported from the EU in 2019, data from Eurostat showed on April 16.

Its officially recorded imports amounted to around 11.4mn tonnes.