Türkiye pushes “zero waste” at COP31, but is it delivering at home?

In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.

As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.

In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.

As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.

After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.

Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.

The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas. 

International campaign lacks domestic punch

Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.

It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.

Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.

“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”

The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.

COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.

President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.

Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.

Single-use plastics ban

To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.

But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs. 

Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.

The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.

To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.

Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.

“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.

Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane

While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.

On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.

Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.

But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.

In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.

Waste imports from Europe

Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.

Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.

The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.

“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.

But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.

At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.

To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.

As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.

Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.