How a city of 20 million people manages waste: Istanbul's experience

How a city of 20 million people manages waste: Istanbul’s experience

“The Turkish experience of waste management, formed over the past two decades, is interesting for its efficiency and will be very useful for Ukraine,” says WMA head Nicole Danilova.

“In the early 2000s, this country had the same problems with solid waste that we have now. Since then, they have been looking for various solutions and have made significant progress. It is important that Turkish experts have already come a long way, but they remember where it all started, what difficulties they faced, what mistakes they made, and are now ready to help Ukraine implement waste management reform faster and more efficiently,” says Nicole Danilova.

Recently, the Ukrainian delegation got acquainted with the work of İSTAÇ, one of the largest waste management and recycling companies in Europe. It has 40 operating units and more than 4,000 employees. 

İSTAÇ was founded in 1994 as a subsidiary of the Istanbul Municipality and started its operations by managing the city’s landfill. Back then, it was really just an ordinary unequipped landfill. Today, İSTAÇ operates using the world’s best technologies, and its activities cover a wide range of areas.

Specialists are constantly developing their own and improving borrowed technologies to achieve the highest possible level of resource circularity and minimize the negative impact on the environment.

İSTAÇ is engaged in the development and construction of landfills, waste sorting and recycling; energy production from waste; and industrial and medical waste disposal.  

The experience of Istanbul is interesting because it is one of the most densely populated megacities in the world, and therefore waste management here has to be carried out in rather difficult conditions. Istanbul is officially home to 15.46 million people, and together with tourists, the population of the metropolis reaches 24 million. More than 18 thousand tons of garbage are generated in the city every day. If the Istanbul authorities hadn’t taken control of the situation 30 years ago, the city would be surrounded by landfills today.

“Istanbul has set a goal to completely abandon landfill disposal by 2050,” says Nicole Danilova, “They are moving towards the goal quite quickly. While in 2020, 92% of all waste was sent to landfill, last year only 62% of all waste was disposed of. By 2030, the figure should be only 29%.”

The principle is simple: the raw materials suitable for this purpose are sorted and processed as much as possible.  And they try to get energy from everything else. Currently, the total capacity of all energy facilities is 184 MWh, which is enough to provide electricity to about half a million people in Istanbul. By 2030, when all the planned projects are commissioned, the total capacity will be 269 MWh.

How to cover two continents

Istanbul has characteristic features that define its solid waste management system. The city stretches across two continents, and these two parts are separated by the Bosphorus. Therefore, the entire waste processing infrastructure is duplicated. And there is almost no separate waste collection. 

First, the garbage is collected by district municipalities and taken to large sorting sites, one on the European and one on the Asian side of the city. All green municipal waste and food waste from restaurant and supermarket chains are immediately sent for composting.

The law requires a double sorting of waste: first, recyclables and organics are separated from the total mass, and then, in accordance with the European directive, radioactive and other hazardous substances that could cause unwanted emissions are removed. After that, the waste has different fates.  Organics are sent to composting stations or biogas plants.

It was in Istanbul that the first biogas plant in Turkey appeared back in 2009.  Now there are two of them.

First, organic waste is crushed and sieved. Then it goes into a special tank with water.  This “soup” is heated from 40°C to 72°C for disinfection.  After that, the mass goes through several stages of fermentation under different conditions.  The output is biogas, as well as liquid and solid degestates, which are actually organic fertilizers that are then used to green the city and roads. Such fertilizers are not allowed to be used in agriculture because of their toxicity.

Biogas is burned in special plants and converted into electricity.  For example, one of the plants processes 130 tons of organic waste per day and has a capacity of 1.4 MW.

By 2050, 45% of municipal waste (virtually all organic waste) should be utilized in this way.

Energy and environmental incineration

The inorganic part of the sorted waste is sent to an energy recovery plant. The 85 MW Istanbul WtE, which opened at the end of 2021, is one of the largest in Europe. It processes about 1.1 million tons of municipal waste per year (almost the annual amount of waste in Kyiv) and produces 560,000 MWh of electricity.

At the entrance to the center, it’s hard to tell what is going on here: the residential buildings start 200 meters from the gate, there are lawns with cats and dogs, traditionally beloved by Turks, and the air is clean.

And there are no complaints from the population about any odors. This freshness is achieved through multi-level filtration. The garbage is checked for metal and harmful radioactive particles, and the smoke at the outlet passes through a four-stage purification system. In lower temperature furnaces, up to 400 degrees, medical waste is sterilized, which can then be incinerated or disposed of at a landfill as inert. 

In incinerators with temperatures above 1000 degrees, solid waste is incinerated, converting heat energy into electricity.  The regulations require that the residue from the incinerated waste should not exceed 25% – but the figures are even lower: 20-22 %. 

So far, there is one incinerator in Istanbul. The second is in the design phase. The city aims to increase incineration rates from the current 16% to 27% by 2030.

From landfills to electricity

So far, Istanbul has insufficient waste processing and disposal capacity. Therefore, landfills continue to fill up. İSTAÇ manages three municipal waste landfills in Istanbul, each of which covers an area of more than 200 hectares. 

However, even in this situation, Turkey is trying to reduce the environmental impact and maximize the use of resources. Therefore, landfill gas is intensively extracted at landfills and converted into electricity. 

And while Ukraine manages to extract 30-35%, in Turkey this figure has already reached 60%, and in some places up to 85%.

By the way, the issue of effective waste management is personally taken care of by the country’s first lady, Emine Erdogan, and to a large extent it is a matter of the authority of the current government. Turkey has indeed managed to achieve very significant results in recent years. The Zero Waste project is gradually being implemented, which aims to increase the sorting of useful materials for recycling, while it is still the standard: glass, fabric, aluminum, paper/cardboard, PET.

The Waste Management Association is actively familiarizing itself with the best Turkish technologies for managing solid waste, industrial and hazardous waste. It also studies and translates the legal framework and regulatory documents so that they can be read by Ukrainian specialists who need to prepare a broad regulatory and legislative framework in a short time.