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Turkey said it would become a zero-waste nation. Instead, it became a dumping ground for Europe's

rubbish by Alexander Clap, read by Philip Arditti. On a chilly evening in late 2016, a few miles from the Turkish city of Adana, a Kurdish farmer named Isitin Akman was sitting on the second floor balcony of his concrete ranch house, when a construction truck backed up to the edge of his citrus groves, paused, then dumped a

great load of rubbish along the roadside.

Before he pulled away, the truck's driver set a paper bag on fire and tossed it on top of the

garbage, triggering an outpouring of flames blacker than the night sky into which they ascended.

Ackman leapt up, put on his sandals and sprinted out along his dirt driveway toward the crackling trash pile.

The trash, by the time Ackman got to it, was a hissing mass of fire.

Plastic is less flammable than wood or paper, though it emits more heat as it burns.

It is at least as capable as either of getting swept up in a gust of wind and, in Akman's case,

setting a light about 50 acres of orange and lemon trees.

Son of a bitch!

Akman wheeled around, ran back home, located a bucket, then rushed back to the conflagration,

which he began dousing with water lifted out of a stream by the edge of the road.

Akman kept pouring.

After about an hour, the flame started to dampen, then die, revealing a bed of thousands of half-inserated fragments of garbage.

Akman knelt down to examine the smouldering pile, turning over bits of candy wrappers and makeup containers with his fingers before being struck by something peculiar.

The writing on the packaging wasn't Kurdish.

It wasn't Turkish either.

...