Humans are capable of many things, but the greatest thing that they do is consume. The immense magnitude of consumption is done by 7 billion people around the world not to mention the factories. With this consumption comes the problem of the century: wastes. What to do with them? This is a very important question to which has a great and simple answer: Why not recycle? Recycling has been a very crucial subject during the past 50 years along with waste management. Today, recycling has become a global market and is a part of our daily life. I?m proud to tell you all that Turkey is among those countries where recycling is taken seriously. We have much to overcome with 70 million citizens? wastes and countless factories and we are still in the process of developing the number of wastes that are recycled. As such, I will be going into the details of Turkey?s position in waste management as well as recycling.

Turkey started recycling in the late 20^th century which is late considering other countries, but we expanded in this field rapidly. In 2012, there was 672 facilities for waste management in Turkey and 80 of these facilities were for the sole of waste containment whereas 589 of these facilities were recycling facilities. 25.8 million tons of waste was collected and transferred to the 80 containment facilities that have a total of 480 million m³ capacity by the municipalities in 20120. 60% of the total waste was sent to the waste collection facilities where they are kept so that the wastes do no harm to the environment. 39% of the total waste was delivered to the landfills. Also, 46 thousand tons of medical waste was sterilized in the facilities and 43% of these wastes were sent to waste collection facilities and 57% was sent to the landfills. Furthermore, 47 thousand tons of hazardous waste and 3 thousand tons of non-hazardous waste, a total of 50 thousand tons of waste, was incinerated. Out of the 25.8 million tons of waste that was collected by the municipalities 9.5 million tons of it was recycled and 158 thousand tons of it was sent to the compost facilities. In other words, 38% of the collected waste was recycled in 2012.

These findings are from the Turkey Statistical Agency and the agency have not published a report concerning 2013 or 2015 so I am not able to inform you about the numbers concerning those years. However, I can assure you that the data of 2012 and the data of 2014 are not very much different as the total number of wastes Turkey produced in 2014 is 26.8 million tons (25 million tons of household waste, 1.2 million tons of industrial waste, 100 thousand tons of medical waste and 530 thousand tons of e-waste waste), so you can assume that the statistics have not changed drastically since the total of produced wastes have not changed as well.

About the recycling, 43% of the recycled wastes in Turkey is paper, 27% is plastic, 12% is glass, 8% is textile and 4% is metal.

As for an overview for recycling in Turkey: In 2004, Turkey was only able to recycle 40-50% of the wastes that could be recycled, the percentage of the recycled items compared to total number of collected wastes is extremely low. In 2010, Turkey had a 35% recycling rate which rose to 38% in 2012 as stated above. It is also estimated that this number was 40% in 2014.

In conclusion, Turkey is developing in the field of waste management and recycling. It is my belief that the recycling percentage will keep on rising, so that we can have a better future.

RESOURCES

http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/goster/haber.aspx?id=260029

http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreHaberBultenleri.do?id=16177

http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreHaberBultenleri.do?id=16170

http://www.izto.org.tr/portals/0/argebulten/gerid%C3%B6n%C3%BC%C5%9F%C3%BCmsekt%C3%B6r%C3%BC_ahmetyetim.pdf