When the British supermarket chain Tesco Plc first started ­collecting plastic bags and wrappers from customers to be recycled in March 2021, Caroline Ragueneau was thrilled. She was working as a retail assistant at a Tesco store in southwest England when the first white deposit boxes appeared, promising to turn what’s typically discarded back into something useful. Plastic is a notorious source of pollution: unsightly on land, deadly to marine wildlife. Ragueneau, 56, an enthusiastic environmentalist, proudly told friends about the initiative.

In August, Tesco announced it was expanding the pilot to all its biggest outlets. Shoppers from Cornwall to Cumbria were invited to return snack packets, shopping bags, and vegetable packaging. Soon after, the company rolled out a national advertising campaign, featuring an image of a young father with a baby in his arms and the words: “Recycling soft plastics shouldn’t be hard.”

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Recycling Warehouse in Southern Turkey

After weeks without a ping, the tracker in the Tesco bag broadcast its location from an industrial estate near Adana, Turkey

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with exporting plastic garbage using brokers. The producer of the waste, Tesco, loses control of where it ends up. The U.K. shipped an average of 575 tons of plastic rubbish to Turkey every day in 2020, even more than it sent to Poland. The effect is to pass on responsibility for dealing with this hard-to-process trash to poorer nations, straining their waste-disposal infrastructure. And as criminal groups target the $50 billion trade in used plastic, both Poland and Turkey are trying to contain an epidemic of waste fraud.

A common scam across Europe is to take the fee that waste brokers pay to dispose of the lowest-grade plastic, then start a fire to clear it at no cost, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and soil. In Turkey there are roughly two suspicious fires a week at recycling centers, normally at night. Unscrupulous operators are also known to use Syrian refugee camps as a source of cheap labor. According to Zielona Gora’s Mayor Kubicki, some Polish fraudsters establish shell companies to rent warehouse space, fill buildings with worthless plastic, then disappear.

Although there’s no evidence that Eurokey or any of its trading partners are involved in these practices, activists and journalists in Adana have previously found Tesco-branded wrappers at illegal dump sites only a few miles from the bag tracker’s final location. Photos from 2021 show a Tesco bag featuring the supermarket’s slogan “Every Little Helps” in a grassy field next to a mound of decaying plastic, as well as Tesco brand roast potato and cocktail sausage wrappers left by the roadside.

There are well-regarded recycling companies in Turkey that can compete with the best in Europe. But when U.K. ­regulators scrutinized Eurokey’s compliance with the rules, the company came up short. In its suspension notice, the Environment Agency said Eurokey had in at least four months of last year exported plastic waste to Turkish sites that weren’t authorized to process the material.

A Eurokey spokesperson said the material it exported, including to Turkey, met regulatory standards and went to reprocessors approved by both U.K. and local authorities, adding that the company “strives for best practices throughout our business and long-term ­relationships with our customers and suppliers based on trust and transparency.”

The practice of exporting garbage isn’t just controversial for the recipient nations. It also fails to achieve its most basic aim: making plastic someone else’s problem. When plastic degrades, it breaks down into microscopic pieces that get everywhere, transported in ocean currents and blown into the atmosphere. Microplastics have been found at alarming levels in baby poop the world over, as well as the stomachs of earthworms and the snowfall on remote Alpine peaks. The potential health risks of this vast spread remain poorly understood.

Tesco has pitched itself as an eco-friendly retailer since the late 1980s, when shrinking rainforests and a growing hole in the ozone layer led to an outbreak of conscience among spooked consumers. But the discovery that sustainability sells created a problem for supermarkets. By then, ­single-use plastics had woven themselves into the entire economy.

Research has shown that customers will pay more for—and buy more of—the same product if it’s wrapped in transparent film. Vacuum-packed plastic can also keep goods fresh for longer. Recycling offers a convenient solution for companies that have to juggle the public’s desire to help the environment against their desire for cheap, convenient goods.

Tesco, through trade coalitions and lobbying organizations, has pushed back against legislative efforts to restrict or tax plastic packaging while promoting recycling as the optimal solution. In 1994 the supermarket was one of 28 companies that responded to the threat of regulation by proposing a plan to boost recycling with a 1-pence levy on consumer goods sales, the Independent newspaper reported. The plan allowed for packaging volumes to increase, too.

When the European Union began weighing new rules to increase the levy on plastic producers, several industry groups in 2016 wrote a letter to the British government calling the move a threat to the “economic well-being of the sector.” It was signed by the British Retail Consortium and packaging body INCPEN, both of which count Tesco as a member. A similar letter in 2017 urged for any response to avoid being “overly prescriptive.”

Tesco says it’s committed to reducing plastic use, as well as recycling, and has eliminated 1.5 billion pieces of plastic from its supply chain since 2019. About two-thirds of the plastic packaging sold in its stores is suitable for routine recycling. (That figure has improved in recent years.) Yet since the Plastics Pact was signed, the amount of plastic put into the market by the 10 biggest U.K. supermarkets has actually increased, according to research by the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace...