Municipalities on the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey have been grappling for decades with an escalating, yet largely overlooked ecological disaster—the complete absence of a viable solid waste management system. This 30-year-old knot has once again been thrust into the spotlight following an administrative fine of over 2.3 million Turkish Lira issued by the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change to a local municipality on April 22, 2026. This situation, however, is far from unique. Across the districts of Ardeşen, Arhavi, Borçka, Hopa, Kemalpaşa, Çamlıhemşin, and Pazar, the daily norm is “wild storage” (open dumping), a practice that involves piling up garbage indiscriminately in natural landscapes without a single environmental safeguard.
Systemic Issues and Institutional Dead Ends
The solid waste dilemma in this region is not merely a localized environmental hazard; it is the culmination of a decades-long institutional deadlock. The 2,346,000 TRY fine imposed on the Fındıklı municipality in Rize province for dumping waste in an open area represents just the tip of the iceberg.
The quest for a regional solution is not a recent endeavor. Initially, between 2007 and 2008, solid waste from Trabzon was disposed of at a site in Sürmene. However, this operation eventually had to be shut down due to severe capacity issues and adverse environmental impacts. To address these systemic failures, the Trabzon and Rize Provinces Local Administrations Solid Waste Facility Construction and Operation Union (TRABİKAP) was established in 2014. The union’s primary goal was to centralize scattered landfill operations and transition toward a regulated storage system. An integrated facility was indeed constructed in Araklı, though it does not function as a modern waste-to-energy incinerator; instead, waste is primarily collected, sorted, and disposed of using conventional storage methods.
Although TRABİKAP currently operates as a municipal union with 29 members, its geographical and structural reach fails to cover numerous districts located further east in the Eastern Black Sea region, leaving them to face the waste crisis completely isolated.
Fındıklı: 13 Tons of Daily Garbage and Bureaucratic Mazes
Ercüment Şahin Çervatoğlu, serving as the Mayor of Fındıklı since 2019, emphasizes that the waste problem transcends party politics. The practice of open dumping has been a consistent feature across successive political administrations. The mayor also highlighted the stark financial realities: constructing a modern waste incineration and energy conversion plant requires an initial investment of at least 25 million euros—a sum fundamentally impossible to cover from a local municipality’s budget.
Since 2019, the Fındıklı municipality has been continuously, yet unsuccessfully, requesting state-owned land to establish a composting facility, which needs to be situated far from residential zones. Within its own limited jurisdiction, the municipality is striving to mitigate the damage. They have set up a 1,000-square-meter indoor packaging collection center, initiated the segregated collection of household waste (paper, cardboard, metal, plastics), and installed collection cages specifically for PET bottles.
The district generates roughly 13 tons of waste every single day, yet relies on just two trucks for collection and transport. Because the ministry has not provided new vehicles for years, Fındıklı has resorted to an emergency workaround: they sell their waste at approximately 3,000 liras per ton to the Rize Special Provincial Administration, which then forwards it to TRABİKAP. Nevertheless, this system is exceptionally fragile. The transfer station often remains closed on weekends and public holidays, or flatly refuses to accept garbage citing capacity shortages. When this happens, the local government is left with absolutely nowhere to deposit the accumulating refuse.
Hopa: Two Decades of Trash on Mountaintops and Roadsides
According to Utku Cihan, who was elected Mayor of Hopa in 2024, the crisis of open dumping has plagued the district for roughly 20 years. Waste is routinely abandoned alongside roads, in vacant lots, and directly on mountaintops. Hopa’s situation is particularly critical because their designated storage area is situated right next to the sea and the main highway. The crisis extends deep into inland districts as well; the Artvin municipality, for instance, transports its garbage to a mountaintop and simply burns it in the open air.
Hopa has also attempted to join TRABİKAP, driven by logical logistical needs, but the union rejected their application, citing a “lack of expansion vision at the present time.” To tackle the issue on a regional scale, the Çoruh Basin Development Union (ÇOKAB) was established back in 2007 and even successfully secured European Union funding. Unfortunately, the project stalled entirely, and the planned recycling facility never materialized. Mayor Cihan pointed out that for such a plant to operate profitably, it would need to process 100 to 150 tons of waste daily. Since the entire Hopa district produces only 25 tons of garbage per day, the active participation of neighboring districts (Arhavi, Borçka, Kemalpaşa) is absolutely essential. The mayor has submitted land allocation requests to the state 19 times so far, yet they have not been granted a single square meter.
Arhavi and Unexploited Opportunities
Turgay Ataselim, the Mayor of Arhavi, drew attention to the glaring omissions of past decades. He emphasized that the municipal unions established in the past have remained entirely dysfunctional. In his experience, one specific union promised to build a comprehensive waste management system for 15 years, yet failed to take a single tangible step toward realizing it. According to Ataselim, a waste sorting and management system is as fundamental a necessity as a water or sewage network, and without it, they “will destroy the Black Sea.” Arhavi is currently working on developing a facility that would simultaneously manage waste storage and generate energy, but this ambitious project also requires broad, cohesive regional collaboration.
Ardeşen and Borçka: Astronomical Costs and Riverbank Dumping
Enver Atagün, the Mayor of Ardeşen, highlighted the severe logistical difficulties of waste transport. Currently, their municipal waste is hauled to Yomra in the neighboring Trabzon province, which hosts the nearest sanitary landfill. However, that facility has reached its maximum capacity, and the transportation and disposal fees are exorbitantly high. Whenever there are disruptions due to personnel shortages or capacity limits, the municipality is frequently forced to dump garbage onto the grounds of older, officially closed landfills. Given the vast distances and soaring fuel costs, Atagün believes that aggressively expanding at-home waste segregation should be the primary and immediate step.
The situation in Borçka is perhaps even more desperate. According to Mayor Ercan Orhan, the municipality is forced to openly dump the waste generated by 41 surrounding villages directly on the banks of the Çoruh River, simply covering the refuse with soil afterward. They have received no positive responses regarding collaboration from either Erzurum or Trabzon, and residents living in the settlement directly across from the dumping site suffer continuously from the severe environmental degradation.
No Solution Without State Intervention
For over 30 years, solid waste management in the Eastern Black Sea region has vastly exceeded the operational and financial capacities of local municipalities, necessitating comprehensive, state-level regional coordination. In the complete absence of an integrated system, local governments are forced to rely on fragmented, temporary methods and desperate workarounds. Ultimately, these actions do nothing more than shift the garbage from one location to another, completely failing to eradicate the root of the crisis. Local leaders are united in their conclusion: until the central government directly intervenes by allocating state land and financing appropriate infrastructural investments, the Black Sea’s waste crisis will remain a permanent, toxic fixture on the coast.
Sources and References:
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Original Article: Bianet – The Black Sea’s 30-year waste knot
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Official State Institution (Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, Republic of Turkey): csb.gov.tr