How Europe ships its waste to Morocco and calls it ‘recycling’

By Khalid Bencherif and Federica Rossi
This story, by Khalid Bencherif and Federica Rossi, was first published on UntoldMag on June 10, 2026. This edited version is published on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Fatima’s eight-year-old son coughed through another sleepless night in Mediouna, a neighbourhood southeast of Casablanca, Morocco, where the air carries something heavier than dust. “I only worry about my child,” she said, unfolding medical records worn soft from handling. “The doctor told me I had to move. But we don't have a place to go.”
Morocco’s government has issued 416 permits authorising the import of European waste — clothes, rubber tyres, industrial byproducts — burned as fuel in cement kilns across the Casablanca-Settat region, including within 15 kilometres (9 miles) of her home. European corporations save an estimated USD 52 million a year by shipping their waste here rather than processing it at home. Fatima doesn’t know that; what she knows is that her son can’t breathe, and that some nights the smell reaches dozens of kilometres from the landfill.
An investigation drawing on exclusive Basel Action Network trade data, customs records and Freedom of Information responses found that European countries shipped at least 36,611 tonnes of waste to Morocco between September 2024 and September 2025, 93 percent of it classified as “reusable” despite declared values as low as EUR 0.10 (USD 0.11) per kilogram.
Industry sale prices for sorted reusable clothing run between EUR 0.50 and EUR 1.50 (USD 0.57 and USD 1.7) per kilogram. At that price, a shipment barely covers sorting and freight.
The gap suggests not just different markets but different goods — genuinely reusable clothing commands higher prices, while low declared values indicate material destined for disposal rather than resale.
The economics of dumping
The arithmetic is brutally simple. Treating waste properly in Europe costs, conservatively, around USD 100 (EUR 88) per tonne. Shipping it to Morocco and burning it in cement kilns costs USD 36 to USD 39 (EUR 32 to EUR 34). Applied to the 821,500 tonnes Morocco reported importing in 2024, that differential is worth roughly USD 50 million (EUR 44 million) a year — a figure that explains why the trade keeps accelerating before the EU export ban on plastic waste deadline on November 21, 2026.
The 36,611-tonne ban figure captures only what Europe still ships under waste codes: clothing, plastics, paper, electronics. The Moroccan Energy Transition and Sustainable Development Ministry’s much larger total includes 517,000 tonnes of ferrous metals and 200,600 tonnes of organic residues that European exporters list as commodity scrap, not waste. The gap between the two figures is essentially the volume reclassified out of the waste category before it leaves Europe. “The longer the chain of parties involved, the shorter the chain of enforcement,” says Paola Ficco, environmental lawyer and director of the Italian magazine Rifiuti. “Unofficial flows are undetectable.”
Spain handles nearly 80 percent of clothing exports to Morocco — 73 tonnes a day — and two-thirds of its plastic waste.
The corporate players are embedded. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” for cement manufacturers. CHIMIREC Maroc told us it processes only domestic waste. LafargeHolcim’s Ecoval subsidiary is the country’s primary industrial waste treatment provider. Ciments du Maroc, owned by Germany’s Heidelberg Materials, operates a grinding centre at Jorf Lasfar — a documented entry point for European shipments. Neither LafargeHolcim nor Ciments du Maroc responded to requests for comment.
The loophole
The Basel Convention nominally restricts wealthy nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones. In practice, a single word change on a customs form — from “waste” to “secondary raw material” — transforms a regulated substance into an unregulated commodity.
According to data collected through a Freedom of Information request, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) told us that between 2020 and 2023 no Italian waste was registered as having gone to Morocco “for disposal purposes” — but, in the same response, it acknowledged that “small quantities” had been shipped during 2021, 2022 and 2023 “for the purpose of material recovery.”
UN Comtrade records for 2023 confirm the flow; approximately 817 tonnes of Italian rubber waste reached Morocco that year, worth USD 427,000. The following August, the Moroccan Ministry of Energy Transition authorised the import of 20,000 tonnes from Italy alone.
The contradiction is the loophole. Under EU law, burning waste in a cement kiln counts as “energy recovery,” not “disposal.” Reclassifying garbage as alternative fuel or reusable merchandise allows European countries to legally erase millions of tonnes from their disposal ledgers while keeping their domestic recycling statistics pristine.
The human cost
The health impacts accumulate invisibly. Communities living near Moroccan cement plants face an excess risk of respiratory disease, cancer and mortality. Peer-reviewed research on cement kilns co-processing hazardous waste has measured dioxin emissions rising more than fourfold once hazardous waste enters the fuel mix. In Morocco specifically, occupational cement exposure has been directly linked to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — a leading cause of respiratory mortality.
Mediouna’s landfill alone receives 1.2 million tonnes a year and is approaching saturation; in November 2024, the World Bank approved a USD 250 million programme to upgrade Morocco’s landfills — a tacit acknowledgement that domestic capacity is inadequate before any added burden from imports.
When the government approved more than two million tonnes of new imports in August 2024, activist Mohamed Benata of the Environmental Assembly of Northern Morocco called it “incompatible with the spirit of citizenship” and unconstitutional. In 2016, similar outrage forced the government to suspend Italian waste imports. The shipments resumed.
European corporate accountability law does not reach what happens after the containers leave port. The 2024 Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive “ends with handing over the goods, more or less,” says Miriam Saage-Maaß, legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Whether European exporters bear any responsibility for what then burns inside Moroccan kilns, she adds, “depends on how direct EU exporters are connected to the waste burning.”
From November 2026, the EU will ban plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries like Morocco; other non-hazardous waste exports will follow in May 2027 unless a country is on an approved list. Morocco submitted its application in February 2025. “Circularity cannot become an elegant way to outsource health and environmental impacts to other communities,” says Cristina Guarda, an Italian MEP from the Greens/EFA, “creating ‘sacrifice zones’ outside Europe.”
Back in Mediouna, Fatima remains caught in the middle. Europe celebrates its recycling milestones; Morocco counts the jobs. She and families like hers are left breathing the toxic fumes — from waste produced at home and shipped in from a continent that no longer wants its own.
This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe