By Janet Ekstract
ISTANBUL-U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu discussed Turkiye’s Zero Waste Project via phone on Sunday. First Lady, Emine Erdogan will be Guterre’s special guest at the U.N. on March 30, when she promotes expanding Turkiye’s Zero Waste Project worldwide. She will be accompanied by Cavusoglu for the event – the International Day of Zero Waste. The First Lady’s project, launched in 2017, emphasizes how crucial it is to eliminate waste and find resourceful methods of recycling it to fight the climate crisis. She then brought her Zero Waste Project to the U.N. to extend its application to other nations, following the project’s success with its recycling initiative.
The Zero Waste Project garnered much attention and international recognition with Guterres lauding the first lady’s efforts at a U.N. conference in New York, last September that led to the U.N. General Assembly unanimously adopting a resolution on a Zero Waste initiative presented by Turkiye, declaring in December 2022, that March 30 is the International Day of Zero Waste. The purpose behind the project is to raise awareness and encourage all sectors in society to realize how waste can be recycled for other uses such as compost fertilizer production as the first lady explained – everything is obtained from organic waste. As Emine Erdogan said: “Organic wastes beautify our gardens instead of polluting the environment.” She explained that such an initiative allows for waste separation at the source, recycling, waste resource prevention that entails saving nature and its natural resources. The Turkish Parliament began implementing the Zero Waste Project in its headquarters on June 12, 2018 with the separation of glass, metal, paper and plastic. The project was launched with the coordination of the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization and is now being used in a number of public institutions in Ankara, specifically the Presidential Complex. The ultimate goal with this project is to achieve mass recycling on a global scale
