From Rubbish to Revolution: How Turkey’s Zero Waste Movement Became a COP31 Centrepiece

The Zero Waste movement began as a domestic Turkish initiative. It is now a UN-recognised framework, a COP31 priority, and — according to its advocates — one of the most practical contributions any country has made to the global circular economy debate. At London Climate Action Week in June 2026, it stepped onto the world stage. This is the story of what it is, what it claims, and what it still needs to prove.

By TurkishBritish Magazine  |  Summer 2026

The word “rubbish” covers a remarkable range of failures. The failure to design products that can be repaired or reused. The failure to build systems that capture materials before they are lost. The failure to price the true cost of disposal into the price of production. These are not primarily behavioural failures — they are systemic ones, and they are responsible for a share of global greenhouse gas emissions that has historically been underweighted in climate discussions.

The Zero Waste movement, which Turkey has developed into both a domestic policy framework and an international diplomatic tool, starts from the premise that this underweighting is a mistake. Waste management — or rather, the redesign of economic systems to eliminate waste at source — is not a secondary or soft issue in climate terms. It is, proponents argue, a core instrument of decarbonisation: reducing methane from landfill, cutting the emissions embedded in the production of materials that are discarded rather than recovered, and shortening the supply chains that generate transport emissions.

Whether that argument fully holds in the rigorous accounting terms that emissions targets require is one of the questions that COP31 will need to help answer. What is beyond dispute is that Turkey has built something unusual: a coherent national programme, an international organisational infrastructure, and a COP presidency that has placed zero waste at the centre of its agenda.

The Movement and Its Structure

The Zero Waste movement in Turkey was launched under the honorary presidency of Emine Erdoğan, wife of President Erdoğan, and has grown from an initial domestic recycling initiative into what the United Nations Environment Programme now recognises as a globally significant framework. The Zero Waste Foundation — Sıfır Atık Vakfı — operates as the institutional vehicle for both domestic implementation and international advocacy.

Samed Ağırbaş, the Foundation’s chairman, has been appointed COP31’s High-Level Climate Champion — the official role that connects the presidency to civil society, business, and non-governmental actors in the run-up to and during the conference. In practice, this means Ağırbaş is responsible for building the non-governmental programme around COP31 and for mobilising the commitments from businesses, cities, and organisations that typically form the “action agenda” alongside formal government negotiations.

The Foundation has been working internationally for several years, engaging with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation — the leading global advocate for circular economy — and with WRAP, the UK-based waste and resources action programme. These partnerships are substantive: the sessions at London Climate Action Week in June 2026, jointly organised between the Zero Waste Foundation and its British counterparts, reflected genuine shared intellectual territory, not just diplomatic courtesy.

The Zero Waste Istanbul Platform

The most significant structural development ahead of COP31 is the launch of the “Zero Waste Istanbul Platform for Climate Action” — a multi-stakeholder body designed to connect zero waste approaches to the specific thematic pillars that dominate the UN climate process.

The platform operates across seven areas: food systems, cities, industry, methane reduction, nature and biodiversity, health, and sustainable development. These are not arbitrary choices. Each represents a domain where circular economy approaches can demonstrably reduce emissions, and each is an area of active negotiation in the UNFCCC process.

The food systems pillar is particularly significant. Globally, food waste is responsible for roughly eight to ten per cent of greenhouse gas emissions — a figure that encompasses the methane from food decomposing in landfill, the emissions embedded in producing food that is never eaten, and the land use changes driven by demand that better systems would reduce. The methane reduction pillar connects directly to the Global Methane Pledge, which has commitments from more than 150 countries but uncertain implementation.

For Istanbul specifically — a city of seventeen million people with one of the world’s most complex urban waste challenges — the platform represents an attempt to translate national policy into urban-scale implementation that can be held up as a model. Whether Istanbul genuinely becomes one of the world’s leading zero waste cities by the time COP31 opens is a matter of execution, not ambition. The target has been set; the work is under way.

The UK Dimension: Why This Matters for British-Turkish Business

Britain has its own circular economy story. WRAP was established in 2000 as a government-funded body to accelerate the transition away from landfill; it has since evolved into one of the world’s most sophisticated bodies working on food waste, textiles, plastics, and supply chain design. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, based in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, is the single most influential global organisation promoting circular economy thinking.

The connection between these UK organisations and Turkey’s Zero Waste programme is not incidental. The sessions at London Climate Action Week in June 2026 — where Ağırbaş presented the COP31 Vision Document for the first time to an international audience — were co-organised with Ellen MacArthur and WRAP. The participants included business representatives, investors, policymakers, and supply chain specialists working on the specific problems of material flows, food systems, and textiles.

For the Turkish-British business community, this represents a practical opportunity. UK expertise in circular economy consulting, supply chain redesign, and waste infrastructure is well developed and internationally recognised. Turkish manufacturing, food processing, and construction sectors are scaling rapidly and face the transition costs that circular economy approaches can, in some cases, reduce. The professional services firms, consultancies, and financial institutions operating across both markets have a genuine commercial interest in positioning themselves ahead of what COP31 will accelerate.

What the Critics Say

The Zero Waste movement has critics, and engaging with their arguments honestly is more useful than ignoring them. The most substantive criticism is that framing waste management as climate action risks creating a category error: treating a genuinely important environmental issue as if it is equivalent in emissions terms to decarbonising energy and industry, where the emissions magnitudes are orders of magnitude larger.

The counter-argument — which Ağırbaş made directly at London Climate Action Week — is that the movement has never claimed equivalence, but rather complementarity: that getting circular economy right reduces emissions, reduces resource extraction, and creates the conditions for a more resilient economy. The Istanbul Platform’s emphasis on methane reduction, food systems, and industrial decarbonisation is a direct response to the criticism that zero waste is too narrow.

A second criticism, more specific to Turkey’s situation, is that the country’s own recycling and waste infrastructure, outside urban centres, remains underdeveloped relative to its ambitions. Hosting a COP on zero waste while significant portions of Turkish rural waste still goes to unmanaged disposal is a tension that the Presidency will need to address head-on, not manage around.