Turkey – With consumption of electronics and electrical items increasing steeply, Turkey is struggling to keep up with the demand for e-scrap recycling services, recycler Exitcom warned at the nation’s recent Electronic Waste Management panel.
Turkey generates roughly 540 000 tonnes of e-scrap per year, estimates Exitcom’s General Manager Murat Ilgar, with the largest producers being the cities of Istanbul, Kocaeli and Ankara. ‘All the waste is processed at 21 facilities based in Turkey,’ pointed out Mr Ilgar. However, more recycling capacity is needed for electronics and electrical goods, he maintained.
Having urged industry to set up new recycling ventures to meet this demand, Mr Ilgar said the most pressing problem concerned refrigerators and freezers, with no Turkish company able to treat them at present. A large number of companies claim to operate recycling facilities but do not actually carry out any recycling, Mr Ilgar remarked. Furthermore, it remains unclear where and how these companies dispose of the waste – a situation which Mr Ilgar blames partially on ‘a lack of proper government inspections’.
The latest update from the Regional Environmental Center (REC) Turkey Country Office indicates that electronic waste volumes increase by 5% each year and are expected to reach 839 000 tonnes by 2020, rendering it the ‘most rapidly growing group of waste products’, according to the REC.
For more information, visit: www.exitcom.de/en
Source: The Turkish Newswire
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