The Zero Waste Project launched in 2017 by the Ministry of Environment, Urban Planning and Climate Change, under the patronage of first lady Emine Erdoğan, has led Turkey's fight against climate change. In the five years since its launch, it has helped the country save enough water to meet the annual demands of 2 million households for one year or 572 billion liters.

Overall, the Zero Waste Project made a contribution of $3.4 billion (TL 62.2 billion) to the Turkish economy by saving resources.

The initiative primarily aims to bring the country in line with sustainable development principles, prevent uncontrolled waste and leave a "cleaner, developed" country to future generations according to the ministry.

It has slowly but steadily gained support from various sectors since 2017. By next year, the aim is to spread it across the entire country to increase the recycling rate to 35% and bring the regular waste storage rate down to 65%. It covers and will further cover municipal areas, public institutions, ports, airports, bus and train stations, schools, shopping centers, hospitals, tourism facilities, large workplaces and places with high population density and waste diversity.

In 2020, the household waste rate reached to 32.3 million tons, from 17 million tons in the first year of the project. It is expected to increase to more than 38 million tons next year. Since June 2017, some 145,000 buildings housing state-run agencies and other places switched to the zero waste management system, in which waste is sorted separately and properly recycled.

So far, 20.4 million tons of paper and cartons, 5.4 million tons of plastic, 2.3 million tons of glass, 500,000 tons of metal and 5.2 million tons of organic waste have been recycled by businesses licensed by the ministry. The collected waste also contributed to saving 530 million kilowatts per hour of electricity, the equivalent of one year of power consumption for 195,000 households. The project also helped the country cut out the space required for waste storage, equal to 69 million cubic meters or 9,288 football pitches.

In other figures, the project prevented the emission of 3.9 million tons of greenhouse gases and saved some 347 million trees.

It also branched out to the seas under the title of "Zero Waste Blue" to save bodies of water from pollution through massive cleanup campaigns. As of 2022, the amount of maritime waste collected and delivered to proper disposal facilities reached about 134,000 tons.

The project received awards last year from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the U.N.-Habitat program and was also included in an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country report in 2019 as a promising project. More recently, it was honored by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, something the first lady says is important as Turkey is "a significant actor" in the Mediterranean region, "one of the places affected by climate change most." Most recently, the first lady was awarded the Climate and Development Leadership award for the project by the World Bank.

Speaking at the opening ceremony on Friday for a waste disposal facility that will boost the recycling rate in the northwestern province of Bursa, Minister of Environment, Urban Planning and Climate Change Murat Kurum said the Zero Waste Project led the efforts in the battle against climate change. "Climate change is undoubtedly one of the biggest environmental problems in the world. It is widely felt all across Turkey and threatens everything from agriculture to public health, from water resources to forests. Turkey, as a Mediterranean country (one of the places most affected by climate change) is affected by climate change. We see floods and landslides in the northern regions of our country while southern regions face wildfires and inner regions of Anatolia clearly feel the impact of the climate change through droughts. We have a Green Development Goal with a net-zero emission target our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan emphasized. In 2053, we hope to achieve this target," he said.

Kurum said waste disposal facilities are part of the fight and they also created new jobs while highlighting that the newly opened facility in Bursa would save enough energy to power some 75,000 residences.