At a Turkish waste plant, COP31’s case for climate action goes beyond fossil fuels

For Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s environment minister and president-designate of this year’s UN climate summit, the route to a transition away from coal, oil and gas also runs through the everyday systems that shape emissions – what cities throw away, how they manage rotting food and garden waste, whether materials are reused, and how coastal ecosystems are protected.

“If we can realise the actions on our action agenda, then we will start transitioning away from fossil fuels, and that means taking concrete steps,” Kurum told journalists at a media briefing during the Blue Dialogue summit on 10 September at Trabzon in Türkiye. “The other items on the action agenda are as important as transitioning away from fossil fuels.”

The summit’s Action Agenda is the UN climate process’ implementation track, which brings together voluntary efforts to turn the Paris Agreement’s goals and COP decisions into real world projects, partnerships and solutions that can be scaled up.

Kurum’s remarks signal how Türkiye wants to present the upcoming November talks in the city of Antalya as not primarily a forum for negotiating new language on fossil fuels, but as an “implementation COP” that seeks progress across clean energy, methane, waste, cities, food, oceans and climate finance. 

Türkiye has largely replaced unregulated dumping with 94 sanitary landfill and waste-sorting facilities, though the sector faces uncertainty as some waste-to-energy projects approach the end of their renewable energy support periods, an ITC spokesperson said. Image: Eco-Business/ Hannah Fernandez

That approach is visible in the summit’s ten-part Action Agenda. Its second theme – Zero Waste and Methane Reduction – treats waste as a climate issue rather than merely a municipal service issue.

Citing studies that attribute around 30 per cent of current global warming to methane, the COP31 presidency argued that waste prevention, circular resource use and better management of organic waste can deliver rapid climate benefits. It has called for countries to halve the projected growth in annual municipal solid waste generation by 2035. 

During a 9 September tour for journalists, operators from Invest Trading & Consulting AG (ITC) showed how the plant puts Türkiye’s zero waste policy into practice. The environmental and waste management company operates integrated solid waste, recycling and energy-recovery facilities. 

The ITC site in Mamak includes a sanitary landfill, a mechanical sorting plant that recovers recyclable materials from municipal waste, and a biomethanisation plant that converts organic waste into biogas for energy generation. Residual waste that cannot be recovered is disposed of in the sanitary landfill.

Waste sorting is being monitored by employees at the ITC waste-to-energy plant. Image: Eco-Business/ Hannah Fernandez

The government said the national recycling rate rose from 13 per cent in 2017 to 37.53 per cent in 2025. But higher recycling alone does not establish how much methane the country has avoided. Landfills remain a major destination for waste, especially where food and other organic materials are not separately collected, composted or treated through anaerobic digestion. 

But Fatih Şimşek , Energy Production Operations Manager of ITC, said that the company’s planned biomethanol plant in Ankara offers another glimpse of the kind of model Türkiye wants to promote through COP31’s Zero Waste and Methane Reduction agenda. The facility would use biogas generated from municipal waste to produce low carbon marine methanol, linking landfill-gas management with the decarbonisation of shipping. 

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We want to develop new renewable energy opportunities, including biomethanol and other products derived from waste, with COP31 fast approaching. 

Fatih Şimşek , Energy Production Operations Manager, Invest Trading & Consulting AG (ITC)

“We want to develop new renewable energy opportunities, including biomethanol and other products derived from waste, with COP31 fast approaching. We are also working on further projects at the Sincan facility in Ankara,” told reporters during the tour. 

The proposed biomethanol project remains at the engineering design stage, with a final investment decision targeted for 2027. Its development also comes as some landfill gas and biogas projects in Türkiye approach the end of their support periods under the country’s Renewable Energy Resources Support Mechanism, or YEKDEM.

Once facilities leave the scheme, they may have to sell electricity into less predictable market conditions while continuing to cover the costs of methane capture, gas treatment and plant maintenance, an ITC spokesperson said. That has increased interest in alternative uses for waste-derived gas, including its conversion into biomethanol.

The project’s ultimate climate value will depend on whether it captures methane that would otherwise escape from waste sites, and on how effectively emissions are controlled throughout the gas collection and fuel production chain.

Methane is a short-lived but powerful warming gas, generated when organic waste decomposes in landfill. Preventing biodegradable waste from reaching landfill is among the most effective ways to avoid methane generation at source.

Türkiye is bordered by the Black Sea in the north, with limited exchange with the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus, making it particularly vulnerable to land-based pollution and marine litter. Image: Eco-Business/ Hannah Fernandez

What begins at the sorting line does not end there. Plastic that is not recovered can enter rivers and seas, poorly managed coastal waste can damage fisheries and tourism, and warming seas magnify the risks faced by cities and communities along Türkiye’s coasts.

That link is central to Türkiye’s push to make Oceans and Seas another standalone theme in the COP31 Action Agenda. For a country bordered by the Black Sea to the north and the Mediterranean, Aegean and Marmara seas elsewhere, marine protection is both a domestic concern and a regional diplomatic priority.

The Black Sea offers the clearest example. Shared by Türkiye, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia, the semi-enclosed basin has limited exchange with the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus, making it particularly vulnerable to land-based pollution and marine litter. Pollution crossing one coastline can circulate through the wider basin, while rising temperatures and other climate impacts compound pressure on coastal ecosystems and livelihoods.

At the Blue Dialogue summit in Trabzon on 10 September, the COP31 presidency launched the Marine Litter Action Platform, a digital hub intended to share solutions, track progress and turn cross-border cooperation against marine litter into measurable action. Kurum said the initiative was designed to extend lessons from the Black Sea to a broader global effort, arguing that waste entering the Black Sea can ultimately reach the Mediterranean and beyond.

COP31 President-designate Murat Kurum delivers a speech on 10 September at the high-level ministerial meeting titled “Blue Dialogue: Ocean & Seas Climate Change and Resilience” in Trabzon, Turkey. Image: COP31

Santa Marta confronts what COP cannot

Kurum’s emphasis on broad implementation comes as a separate diplomatic process seeks a more direct answer to the fossil fuel question. In April, 57 countries gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first international conference focused on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Participants included Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Nepal, alongside Türkiye and a number of Pacific-island states.

The conference was created in response to a gap in the UN climate process: while COP28 recognised the need to transition away from fossil fuels, it did not set out detailed guidelines, a roadmap or mechanisms for implementation. Co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, the Santa Marta meeting aimed to give an initial group of 57 countries a space to cooperate on practical next steps without requiring consensus from all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

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Climate action has to tackle many things at once, but how you produce an agenda this detailed while somehow overlooking the biggest source of the problem is a rather remarkable piece of political gymnastics.

Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns, 350.org

The Santa Marta meeting did not produce a binding fossil fuel treaty. But it launched work on the practical and political questions that UN negotiations have struggled to resolve, including how to stop the expansion of coal, oil and gas, manage production declines, and support workers and regions whose economies depend on extraction. The process is due to continue with a follow-up conference hosted by Tuvalu and co-hosted by Ireland in early 2027. 

Santa Marta asks how governments can organise an eventual decline in fossil fuel supply. COP31, as Kurum presents it, asks how investment, waste systems, clean energy deployment and resilient coastal economies can make that transition possible.

But Andreas Sieber, Associate Director of Policy and Campaigns at climate advocacy group 350.org, said the COP31 agenda risks treating measures with very different climate impacts as equivalent.

COP31’s Action Agenda sets out ten priority areas and around 50 sub-priorities, yet nowhere does it explicitly mention coal, oil or gas, which account for more than 75 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, while waste, one of the primary priorities of Türkiye’s action agenda, by comparison, accounts for roughly 3.5 per cent, Sieber said.

“Climate action has to tackle many things at once, but how you produce an agenda this detailed while somehow overlooking the biggest source of the problem is a rather remarkable piece of political gymnastics,” he told Eco-Business.

“Looking at the numbers, [all action agenda items] are not equally important. Fossil fuels cause more than 20 times more emissions than waste. The conclusion that they are equal remains a mystery to me, unless the COP31 presidency operates with different maths from everyone else on the planet,” he added.

Sieber said that, after another fossil fuel price shock, COP31 could not avoid the question of how to transition away from coal, oil and gas. He called on Türkiye to “lead from the front” by setting a long-awaited date to phase out coal domestically.

Back at the waste plant, the argument for implementation is easy to see as each diverted tonne of organic waste can mean less methane from landfill, each recovered material can reduce demand for new extraction. But the bigger question facing COP31 is whether these gains can be assembled quickly enough – and at sufficient scale – to change the world’s dependence on coal, oil and gas.

Kurum’s answer is that the transition will be built through the whole agenda, not delivered by a single phrase in a COP text. For critics and negotiators heading to Antalya, the test will be whether that agenda produces measurable emissions cuts and finance for a managed fossil fuel exit, rather than becoming a substitute for confronting it.