ALIAĞA, Türkiye — Every day, as dusk settles over the Aegean Sea, small vans ferrying workers homeward bustle in and out of Aliağa, a town nestled against lush, forested hills in the western İzmir province of Türkiye, formerly known as Turkey. Stepping out in oil-streaked overalls after a long day, the workers’ scent blends with the thick industrial haze, a smell alien to outsiders and unnoticed by locals. Since the 1970s, this historic town near the ancient city of Troy, has become one of Türkiye’s prime industrial hubs, home to oil refineries, a liquefied natural gas plant and iron-steel furnaces. These highly polluting industries have helped transform the area into a notorious hotspot of carcinogenic contamination. But another key culprit lies just out of sight, hidden at the bay’s edge: shipbreaking. Aliağa is the world’s fourth destination for decaying oil rigs, container carriers and cruise ships. According to the Brussels-based NGO Shipbreaking Platform, at least 2,224 vessels have been dismantled there over the past 15 years, spewing out billions of tons of scrap metal, along with oil from the guts of rusty tankers, old electric wires, asbestos-based insulants and thousands of liters of bilge and ballast water. Locals know better than to eat the fish caught in Aliağa’s waters, which receive a toxic cocktail of pollution from the shipyards, a fisher and a shipbreaker told Mongabay. “They say even the fish is inedible here because it smells like shipbreaking,” the shipbreaker said. Yet this doesn’t stop people from selling fish…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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