A youth group participate in cleaning up trash at Venice Beach for Earth Day on April 22, 2023, in Los Angeles.
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Frederic. J. Brown
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AFP via Getty Images
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Topline:
For years, companies have been trying to offset their greenhouse gas emissions with carbon credits. Now, they want to do the same thing for their plastic pollution.
Why it's controversial: Credits represent a waste management approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis, rather than the strict controls on plastic production that many experts and environmental advocates would prefer to focus on.
What supporters say: Peter Hjemdahl, co-founder of the plastic crediting initiative Repurpose Global, says financing from the private sector is “critical” for cleaning up plastic waste and “empowering” waste pickers. Many parts of the world lack formal waste management infrastructure to deal with domestically generated trash, let alone the 14 million metric tons of plastic that enters the ocean each year and may wash up on their shores.
Companies are claiming to be ‘plastic neutral.’ Is it greenwashing?
For years, companies have been trying to offset their greenhouse gas emissions with carbon credits. Now, they want to do the same thing for their plastic pollution.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
A growing number of companies are claiming “plastic neutrality” through the purchase of so-called plastic credits, tradable units that typically each represent 1 metric ton of plastic waste that’s been removed from the environment. These credits, sold by dozens of unregulated businesses and nonprofits, are supposed to complement companies’ internal plastic reduction strategies while also funding waste collection in the developing world.
Companies as varied as Burt’s Bees, Nestlé, and the pet food brand Nature’s Logic have vowed to neutralize at least some of their plastic footprint using credits. The beauty product company Davines, for example, says that for every piece of plastic it sells to consumers, it funds the removal of an equivalent amount of plastic from coastal areas in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brazil.
“We are reaching a 1:1 balance between the plastic we use and the plastic we remove from the environment,” the company says on its website.
Skepticism about "offsetting" plastic impacts
But does plastic waste collection in one part of the world really “offset” the impacts from ongoing plastic production, use, and disposal somewhere else? Some experts and environmental groups are skeptical. They worry that plastic credits place a disproportionate emphasis on managing, rather than reducing, plastic garbage. Some say credits are just a way for polluters to burnish their reputations without taking responsibility for the plastic they produce.
“Frankly, it’s all greenwashing,” said Kevin Budris, advocacy director for the nonprofit Just Zero. “The only real solution to the full suite of plastic pollution problems is to stop making so much plastic in the first place.”
If you look at most of the plastic crediting initiatives out there — and there are a lot — most of them offer a similar value proposition: Plastic credits can help fund waste collection in the developing world.
How it works
Here’s how they work: A crediting organization funds a project that purports to collect plastic pollution, or prevent it from escaping into the environment. This could be a beach or river cleanup that collects low-value, nonrecyclable plastic waste and disposes of it in a controlled landfill. Or it could be a program to pay “waste pickers,” the uncontracted workers who make their living by collecting refuse from dump sites and the natural environment and selling it to recyclers. The main requirement is that activities funded by plastic credits would not have taken place otherwise: They have to be “additional,” in the industry parlance.
That crediting initiative then measures the amount of waste collected and posts the appropriate number of credits in a registry, usually one credit per metric ton. Companies buy those credits, and by doing so they support the underlying plastic collection activity.
A waste picker sorts through plastic bottle waste at the Dandora garbage dump in Nairobi.
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According to Peter Hjemdahl, co-founder of the plastic crediting initiative Repurpose Global, this financing from the private sector is “critical” for cleaning up plastic waste and “empowering” waste pickers. After all, many parts of the world lack formal waste management infrastructure to deal with domestically generated trash, let alone the 14 million metric tons of plastic that enters the ocean each year and may wash up on their shores.
Hjemdahl claims companies want to fund these activities because their employees have “moral consciousness.” But there are other, more practical reasons companies might want to buy plastic credits: According to Thierry Sanders, co-founder and director of the crediting company Circular Action BV, polluters that have to comply with “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, laws — policies that make companies financially responsible for dealing the pollution they cause — can use plastic credits to demonstrate that a certain percentage of the plastic they sell is ultimately collected and recycled. In Vietnam, for example, an EPR law enacted last year set mandatory recycling targets for a range of products, including plastic packaging. Any company wanting to sell plastic packaging could use plastic credits to prove that the required percentage of its sales was eventually recycled. (At least, they could prove that a certain amount of plastic was recycled; it would be nearly impossible to prove it was their plastic that was collected and turned into new products.)
Where laws stand worldwide
The current reality, however, is that most parts of the world don’t have EPR laws — which leads to the third and perhaps most salient reason companies are interested in plastic credits: for their marketing value. Credits are “more for corporations that want to make specific claims,” said Vincent Decap, co-founder of a crediting initiative called Zero Plastic Oceans.
Indeed, many plastic crediting programs have a prominent section of their website explaining how companies can use credits to make green marketing claims, or affix proprietary labels to their products. Repurpose Global notes on its website that eco-friendly labels help products “scale significantly faster.” PCX, another crediting organization, encourages brands to “wear your badge with pride,” because doing so will help consumers “know you’re the real deal.”
Most of these badges and labels involve some kind of offsetting language, like “plastic neutral,” “net circular plastic,” and “net-zero plastic to nature.” Similar to carbon credits, these claims generally mean that a company has purchased enough plastic credits to “offset” whatever plastic pollution it contributes to the world. In this way, the impact of one plastic bag sold to the public — and potentially littered into the ocean — is supposedly neutralized by the collection of an equivalent amount of plastic pollution by weight.
Why equivalency is a concern
Some 14 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean each year.
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The problem, however, is that not everyone believes those neutrality claims are the real deal. First is an equivalency concern: Unlike with carbon molecules, which one can reasonably assume will all behave similarly in the atmosphere, not all plastics are created equal. Plastic film is the most lethal form of plastic to marine life and is extremely difficult to remove from the environment and recycle. Plastics labeled with a number 3, 6, or 7 may be more likely than others to release hormone and endocrine disruptors. Meanwhile, PET water bottles, labeled with the number 1, aren’t as dangerous to natural environments and tend to get recycled. Yet crediting programs may ignore these differences, using the collection of one polymer to ostensibly neutralize the impact of another.
According to Alejandra Warren, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Plastic Free Future, these impacts are by no means erased when a plastic producer in one country pays for garbage to be removed from another country’s shoreline. “Plastic credits do not address the ongoing and future environmental injustices caused by the plastics industries around the world,” she told Grist.
Plastic crediting organizations are not oblivious to these concerns, especially as the carbon market has become engulfed in controversy over alleged greenwashing and “phantom” carbon credits that don’t actually cancel out ongoing greenhouse gas emissions. By selling potentially fraudulent carbon offsets, some lawyers say carbon crediting organizations have put themselves at risk of a “wave of litigation” from consumer protection lawsuits. According to the legal nonprofit ClientEarth, plastic creditors may be exposing themselves to the same risks.
Some crediting organizations are trying to distance themselves from those controversies by moving away from neutrality claims and toward something called a “contribution model,” in which companies pay for plastic credits without the goal of claiming plastic neutrality. Rather than bearing a “net-zero plastic” label, a product might read, “This company paid for the removal of 5 tons of plastic litter in 2022.”
That kind of label describes “what’s actually happening,” said Alix Grabowski, director of plastic and material science for the nonprofit WWF, “versus this vague term of ‘neutral,’ which no one knows what it really means.” She said it would be helpful for regulators like the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the United States’ consumer protection laws, to step in with some clearer guidelines on these kinds of environmental claims. Others are hopeful that an initiative called the Plastic Footprint Network, composed of consulting groups, plastic crediting initiatives, and a small number of nonprofits, will rally the industry around a common set of standards.
Plastic bottles at a junk shop in Manila, Philippines.
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Decap, whose organization Zero Plastic Oceans offers companies a label that reads “ocean-bound plastic neutral,” said he hopes to switch to contribution-based labels by sometime next year. That way, he said, “we will not have this stain from what’s happening in the carbon market, which is honestly pretty ugly.” Hjemdahl also said more contribution-based language is needed, although he didn’t say whether or when Repurpose Global would phase out its plastic neutrality labels.
Plastic credits vs. strict controls
Regardless of the kinds of claims companies make about plastic credits, they remain controversial. Credits represent a waste management approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis, rather than the strict controls on plastic production that many experts and environmental advocates would prefer to focus on.
Hjemdahl, with Repurpose Global, said reducing plastic production needs to be prioritized “first and foremost,” but also said that choosing one over the other creates a “false dichotomy” that is “actively allowing polluters to thrive amid the lack of clarity from practitioners.” According to him, plastic reduction “is not going to have an impact by itself if there is no infrastructure to actually collect waste in the first place.”
Environmental advocates, on the other hand, say it’s the other way around: Even the sincerest efforts to ramp up waste collection and recycling will be futile in the face of the plastic industry’s plans to triple plastic production by 2060 — a scenario that’s expected to generate 44 million metric tons of plastic pollution annually. “If reduction and cleanup efforts are pursued simultaneously, but cleanup efforts are getting even an equal amount of attention, then those are resources and efforts that are misplaced,” said Budris, with Just Zero.
He and others argue that cleanups like those encouraged by plastic credits align with the petrochemical industry’s “sophisticated greenwashing” strategy to build good will among consumers and policymakers so they can justify not imposing caps or reductions on the production of plastic. This dynamic has played out prominently in negotiations for a global plastics treaty, in which oil-producing nations have called for more cleanups and recycling as an alternative to a cap on plastic manufacturing. It’s also manifested in industry-led cleanup initiatives like the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, whose fossil fuel and petrochemical company members, including Exxon Mobil and Shell, have a vested interest in keeping the world dependent on plastics.
Budris called it “preposterous” to frame plastic credits as a way to support waste pickers in the developing world. So much of the plastic waste that pickers deal with, he said, can be traced to the fact that they’re “drowning in a tide of single-use plastic” whose production they had no say in or control over.
“If these companies really want to do something to improve waste management in the Global South,” he added, “they need to just stop making so much plastic. That’s the easiest route to addressing so many of these issues.”
Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published April 1, 2026 12:00 PM
Tennis courts featured in an April Fools' Day social media post by Irvine.
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Topline:
Many Southern California cities and institutions are dropping big, grabby news today — from the city of Irvine going "pickle-ball" only, to the Huntington Botanical Gardens announcing it'll be bottling the scent of the famed corpse flower as a perfume.
Why now: Before you go "what the what" — remember today's the first day of April.
Read on ... to find a roundup of some of the April Fools' jokes from your city and local trusted institutions.
Many Southern California cities and institutions are dropping big, grabby news today. Before you go "what the what" — remember, it's the first day of April.
Here's a roundup of some of the April Fools' news dump items.
Irvine, the 'pickleball-only' city
Irvine announced that it'll be converting all tennis courts into pickleball courts by 2027. That's one notch for Team Pickleball in the ongoing turf war between tennis lovers and pickleball players over the fight for court space to engage in their beloved sport.
"Starting today, April 1, all tennis courts are being converted to pickleball courts as part of a citywide effort to make Irvine a pickleball-only City by 2027," the post stated. "We don’t just think this is a good idea … we dink it’s a great one."
Over in Long Beach, Mayor Rex Richardson announced the city's reigning royalty, the Queen Mary, will be renamed after another queen.
"After careful consideration, I am proud to announce that the Queen Mary will officially be renamed the RMS Queen Latifah," he said. "Long Beach is stepping into a new era as a major music destination — with a new amphitheater, a deep cultural legacy, and a future built on sound. It’s only right that our most iconic Queen reflects that energy."
In real-real news, LBC native and everyone's favorite Olympics commenter Snoop Dogg is headlining the grand opening show of the Long Beach Amphitheater in June. That's the new waterfront venue near the RMS Queen Latifah.
Suspense writer James Patterson has more than 200 novels to his name, selling more than 450 million copies. If anyone deserves his own namesake branch, it would be Patterson, no?
The Los Angeles Public Library certainly dinks so, announcing today the James Patterson Canoga Park branch, "with wall to wall Patterson books and programming centered around this prolific author."
The opening of the corpse flower has become an annual event at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. The event brings legions hoping to get a whiff of the famed flower's "pungent aroma."
The San Marino institution announced that it's bottling the scent, as part of its new "The Huntington's Stank Collection."
"A musky gym sock note opens this unique fragrance, with a sweet, rotten-egg base to ground it. Smells like you – but smellier," the post explained.
Payton Seda
is an associate producer for AirTalk and FilmWeek, hosted by Larry Mantle.
Published April 1, 2026 11:30 AM
We curated some great spots to thrift throughout the region.
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Topline:
Southern California is home to a vast array of vintage boutiques, thrift stores, and resale shops. Here are the hottest recommendations from our most avid thrifters.
Palm Springs is a apparently a thrifting hot spot. This thrift chain has locations throughout the Coachella Valley.
Read more... for lots of other secondhand spots.
Los Angeles may not be the fashion capital of the world, but it could contend for best thrift, at least in our humble opinion!
The key is knowing where to look.
Here are some of the best thrift and resale stores in different parts of Southern California according to our listeners and (very stylish) LAist colleagues.
The pinnacle of Pasadena and open every third Sunday of the month, the flea market houses 400 vendors with goods ranging from antique furniture to unique second-hand clothing.
If you’re looking for more affordable clothing and household items, Delaine Ureño, LAist senior institutional giving officer, frequents Hotbox Vintage in South Pasadena.
This thrift shop in San Pedro is owned and operated by the Peninsula Chapter of National Charity League and comes recommended by Mel in the South Bay, who says proceeds support local charities and scholarship funds.
This thrift store rec near Elysian Park comes from Lulu in Glendale, who says shoppers can grab a cute pair of pants along with unique furniture to put them in.
Anything on Long Beach’s aptly named Retro Row is worth hitting, according to AirTalk producer Manny Valladares. His favorite spot is Far Outfit. They have unique finds mostly from the early 2000s with a self-described “weird” factor.
With several locations throughout Orange County, including Costa Mesa and Aliso Viejo, LAist reporter Yusra Farzan recommends Laura’s House, noting they have a great curated collection and proceeds help domestic violence victims.
Old Towne Orange is home to many great thrift stores and antique malls. If you’re looking for some good streetwear and sports jerseys, Timeless Vintage is a good choice. They have a great selection of 90s Looney Tunes and Disney graphic tees as well.
Another O.C. favorite is a fairly new addition to downtown Fullerton. Retropolis has a wide selection of apparel, but I like to go there for their chunky 80s sweaters and colorful jackets.
“[Eco Thrift] has really good discount days on top of already affordable clothing,” said Dañiel Martinez, LAist’s Weekend Edition producer. “Tons of good vintage and designer finds hidden in the racks.”
“I went to Palm Springs where they have some of the best thrifting,” said AirTalk listener Monica in Artesia. She bought a pair of Ferragamo shoes for just $8.
Kevin Tidmarsh, LAist’s All Things Considered producer, specifically recommends Revivals, a thrift chain with locations throughout the Coachella Valley.
611 South Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs
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The storefront at Echo Park Eats, which rents ghost kitchens to 40 restaurants.
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Crosstown
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Topline:
Some of Los Angeles’s most iconic eateries — Papa Cristo’s in Pico-Union, Guerrilla Tacos in Downtown and French eatery TAIX in Echo Park — have closed their doors, prompting hand-wringing about the decline of the city’s rich and diverse food scene. But those closures obscured a more notable achievement; 758 new restaurants opened last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024, when 729 restaurants opened.
Self service and delivery apps: The explosion of digital-order services has rewritten the business model for restaurants, which are now operating with less space, reduced staff and tighter margins. Many of the new eateries do much of their business from behind a screen — either through self-service tablets or off delivery apps such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats.
Ghost kitchens: Ghost kitchens, or private kitchens used exclusively for delivery and takeout, have become a business model of their own. At Beverly Bites, 56 restaurants operate out of one facility serving the densely populated Beverly Hills and Beverlywood neighborhoods, though not all of them are open simultaneously. At Echo Park Eats, 40 restaurants are now within a five minute walk of Dodger Stadium.
Some of Los Angeles’s most iconic eateries — Papa Cristo’s in Pico-Union, Guerrilla Tacos in Downtown and French eatery TAIX in Echo Park — have closed their doors, prompting hand-wringing about the decline of the city’s rich and diverse food scene.
But those closures obscured a more notable achievement; 758 new restaurants opened last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024, when 729 restaurants opened.
The split-screen view of dining in Los Angeles is part of a broader transformation that is reshaping the industry nationwide.
The explosion of digital-order services has rewritten the business model for restaurants, which are now operating with less space, reduced staff and tighter margins. Many of the new eateries do much of their business from behind a screen—either through self-service tablets or off delivery apps such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats.
So-called “limited-service” restaurants now account for nearly a third of all newly opened establishments. The number of traditional, or full-service, restaurants has also been growing, hitting 539 openings in 2025, and a record-high 587 the year before. If you count the number of coffee, smoothie and snack joints, the numbers rise even further.
Pizza to go
Many of Los Angeles’s restaurateurs are adapting to this burgeoning business model. Last year, Liz Gutierrez turned her pop-up restaurant, Fiorelli Pizza, into a small brick-and-mortar location in Beverly Grove with just a couple of stools at a counter for seating. As she saw restaurants closing their doors, the advantages of the new business model quickly dawned on her.
“This was something that could be operated with minimum labor, it could be way more manageable in terms of fixed costs and expenses, and we could still deliver restaurant-quality [food],” Gutierrez said.
The bevy of new food establishments opening their doors is a lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak economic picture: The total number of new businesses opening in the city is nearly half what it was a decade ago. That is driven in part by some of the same forces, such as Amazon.com, Inc. and other online retailers that put pressure on businesses operating out of traditional storefronts.
But the flourishing restaurant industry has been able to buck that trend so far. While Amazon can deliver clothes and even groceries, it still can’t deliver a fresh pizza or poké bowl.
The QR code will take your order
Linchi Kwok, a hospitality management researcher at Collins College of Hospitality Management at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said a lack of interest in working in the hospitality industry, paired with rising labor costs, has pushed restaurant owners to find cost-effective workarounds to run their operations with fewer people.
“Limited-service restaurants don’t have to hire many people to do the work. It saves labor costs, saves space, and saves the service turn-around time. They don’t have to worry about it,” Kwok said.
Restaurants must share a portion of their already slim profit margins—usually between 2-4% in L.A.—with an app service and the driver. To offset that, restaurants have cut down on staff, letting go of waiters, hostesses and dishwashers, many of whom are no longer needed when orders are increasingly being delivered in disposable containers.
Despite the record number of openings, running a restaurant in the city has not gotten any easier. Jot Condie, president and chief executive of the California Restaurant Association, noted that in 2024 taxable restaurant revenue hit $11 billion, which, when adjusted for inflation, is on par with 2012 levels.
“The piece of the pie that each restaurant gets is slimmer.”
Condie also said that the hollowing out of entertainment work, increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and stricter regulations “are conspiring against the L.A. restaurant scene.”
Condie said that regulations from city hall, such as stricter labor oversight and a proposal for a $30 minimum wage for some workers, are making it even tougher.
“The business environment is bad generally in L.A., but the city council and the mayor seem to be throwing salt in the wound.”
As the number of new restaurant openings has spiked, so have the number of closings reported to the city. However, business closure figures are not as reliable as business opening data, as some establishments close without reporting it to the city. Since 2021, 593 full- and limited-service restaurants have reported closing, compared with 3,148 openings.
Jimmy Chu spent several years working in fine dining, which inspired him to start his own restaurant. He knew it would be expensive. Rather than opening another fine-dining establishment, he opted for a limited-service restaurant where customers could order at the counter, no waiters involved.
Chu quit his job by the end of 2024, and in May 2025, he opened Bomb Hot Dog in Downtown Los Angeles. He estimates that his eatery gets roughly a third of its customers through mobile delivery orders.
Ghost kitchens
Ghost kitchens, or private kitchens used exclusively for delivery and takeout, have become a business model of their own. At Beverly Bites, 56 restaurants operate out of one facility serving the densely populated Beverly Hills and Beverlywood neighborhoods, though not all of them are open simultaneously. At Echo Park Eats, 40 restaurants are now within a five minute walk of Dodger Stadium. The Los Angeles Dodgers schedule was hung on the wall inside the facility, so owners can anticipate heavy foot traffic and delivery orders during home games.
Last December, Ali Elreda rented out a space for his Mediterranean-Mexican fusion restaurant, Fatima’s Grill, at Echo Park Eats.
Elreda operates four brick-and-mortar Fatima’s Grill locations, and this is his first time renting a ghost kitchen. He said the decision to start a delivery and takeout location was both a matter of savings and efficiency.
“A lot of people are going the ghost-kitchen route because it’s quicker, it’s faster,” Elreda said. “You avoid a lot of overhead and foot traffic and having to find staff these days with the expensive economy out there is kind of tough.”
With ghost kitchen facilities, business owners also no longer have to compete with each other to find prime real estate in Los Angeles.
“You don’t have to do that research where you’ve got to find the right location. It’s just right there waiting for you,” Elreda said.
How we did it: We examined more than 15 years of business license data reported to the Los Angeles Office of Finance. Have questions about our data or want to ask us something? Write to use at askus@xtown.la Hyperlocal News
It's been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The war has widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.
Lost opportunities: The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go. One man said, "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain." However, another man said "There is no such thing as hardship in Iran. Everyone lives freely, woman or man."
Some remain hopeful: Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Bout as one Iranian university students said, "The war should never have started. But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," meaning toppling Iran's regime.
VAN, Turkey — It has been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The U.S. says it has hit more than 10,000 targets. But U.S.- and Norway-based human rights groups estimate that at least hundreds of Iranian civilians have also been killed.
The war has also widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.
"There is difficulty [with the bombing], but we are not that weak," says one Iranian woman from Tehran, traveling to Turkey for a short break, given that her work has stopped due to the U.S. and Israeli bombing of the capital city. "In the past few years, the Islamic Republic [of Iran] has proved to us that we cannot trust them. But we were in war with Israel in the summer [during the 12-day war], and we saw how precise their targeting was, so we trust them."
"We are going to build a nuclear bomb now, because there's no fatwa against it anymore," interjects an Iranian man, overhearing her remarks, referring to a rumored religious ban on nuclear weapons issued by Iran's former supreme leader, whom Israel assassinated with U.S. help at the beginning of the war in late February.
Like all the Iranians in this story, the two people asked to remain anonymous. They have received texts from the Iranian government and have seen signs coming out of Iran warning them not to speak to foreign media on pain of arrest.
A microcosm of divergent opinions
Just across the border with Iran, in eastern Turkey, the Turkish city of Van is just as full as during prewar times, with thousands of Iranian workers, consulate employees, students and tourists, who are traveling despite the war in their home country. Van has also become a microcosm of the full range of divergent opinions that Iranians have about the war.
"There is no such thing as hardship in Iran," says one Iranian man, who crossed into Turkey for his job last week. "Everyone lives freely, woman or man."
Next to him, a second Iranian man looks at him, wide-eyed and shaking.
"In two days, the government killed 40,000 people," the man says, referring to a government crackdown in January on protesters. A U.S.-based human rights group has confirmed over 7,000 deaths, but many Iranians believe the death toll is far higher.
NPR has not been able to travel and report inside Iran, so it has been interviewing Iranians traveling through border areas, including in eastern Turkey.
The dozens of Iranians NPR has interviewed transiting through Van may not be representative of all Iranians in the country. Many Iranians in Van are those wealthy enough to travel. But there are also poorer Iranians working, often under the table, in Turkey. A few Iranians I met and interviewed say they are heading off to study abroad.
The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go.
"Our pain is something you have to feel for yourself [to understand]," says one Iranian man who has been working in Turkey for the last year. He spent the previous seven years in prison, he says, after being accused of being an anti-Islamic heretic. "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain. They are pain incarnate," he says, so much so, he is willing to lose all he has, even his family in Iran, for his government to be wiped out.
"The war should never have started," says one Iranian university student. "But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," she says, meaning toppling Iran's regime.
"Met with bullets"
Some Iranians who support the war against their own country say their perspectives are indelibly shaped by that government crackdown in early January. This year's killings of demonstrators finally made them realize, they say, that decades of popular resistance would never change their government.
"Three of my own friends were killed" in the crackdown, says one Iranian man. He crossed into Turkey last week to earn money, more than he could make in Iran. "My friends were all young. I knew them all my life. Yet the government killed them so easily."
"Every two years, there is a big protest," he says. Research from Stanford University published this year found thousands of instances of dissent over the last decade and a half, averaging to one protest every three days inside Iran.
But this time, his hometown, in Iran's western Kermanshah province, was brutally punished by government paramilitary groups for people in his town participating in January's protests.
"It is as if my town has been burned down. Nothing is left of it," he says. "I see no future for my children in Iran." His only hope now, he says, is a foreign intervention. "Our only hope is Trump. Our only hope is that Trump and Bibi [Israel's prime minister] make the right moves."
"We are scared of the bombing," an Iranian woman says. "But we are happy thinking that there might be a light at the end of this darkness. When our young people went out and protested this January, they were met with bullets. With slaughter. With executions."
Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Migration data from the United Nations shows fewer Iranians are leaving Iran for Turkey than before the war.
"We are not fleeing," says one young Tehran resident. Even though she almost lost an eye in the anti-government demonstrations this winter, she says she is going back to Tehran in a few days. "We are determined to rebuild our country, and if the government changes, I will work, for free if needed."
Copyright 2026 NPR
