Building Turkey’s capacity to manage hazardous waste

National inventories for tracking waste types by location represent crucial environmental management tools and LIFE TCY support has helped develop a new web-based system for cataloguing and classifying Turkey’s growing volumes of hazardous waste.

Hazardous waste contains properties that make it dangerous or potentially harmful to human health or the environment. These categories of waste are listed by the EU and comprise many forms, such as the by-products of manufacturing processes or simply discarded commercial products, like cleaning fluids or pesticides. Managing hazardous waste effectively requires coordination of interrelated issues including regulatory controls, monitoring programmes, treatment technologies and stakeholder capacity building.

Establishing these coordinated waste management systems remains a challenge in some parts of the Mediterranean area and this has previously been the case in Turkey. As much as 2.4 million tonnes of Turkish hazardous waste is estimated to be produced each year and the national authorities have faced considerable problems in properly tracking, treating or preventing illegal dumping of this dangerous waste. Only one dedicated treatment facility exists in Turkey, a country which compares in size with the combined land masses of Metropolitan France and the United Kingdom. Several smaller facilities are able to recover hazardous wastes (oil, paint sludge, etc.) and a number of cement kilns use hazardous waste as an alternative fuel, but other than that a significant gap exists in the country’s capacity to cope with its growing waste management issues.

The EU accession process has been strengthening Turkey’s capacity to improve its hazardous waste management systems and harmonise them with the protection measures implemented by Member States under the Waste Framework Directive. LIFE TCY has played an important part in this capacity building process, by putting in place measures to help the government enforce its 2005 Regulation on the monitoring of hazardous waste and increase understanding about the definition, monitoring, and management of such waste.

Defining waste details

Turkey’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry was the main beneficiary for the LIFE ‘HAWAMAN’ project, which began in January 2007 and which will receive EU co-financing of €580 000 over a 20 month period. Project priorities focused on developing a new and reliable inventory of hazardous wastes, since this would provide the baseline from which the necessary management, monitoring and control capacities could be built within the Ministry, and then rolled-out to other stakeholders.

Various approaches were considered and a web-based national notification system was selected as the most appropriate long term inventory tool. A considerable amount of time was spent integrating existing data from different sources and this work benefited from good cooperation with business bodies (Turkish Unions of Chambers and Stock markets) and other civil servants (Turkish Statistic Institute).

More than 40 000 potential hazardous waste generators were identified, registered and contacted. The response by industry was particularly positive and the majority of Turkey’s larger industries provided the required information. Return rates for electronic notifications were 10 times higher than that of the previous paper-based system, and results allowed for the first time the preparation of a reliable hazardous waste inventory on a national scale. The notification process was fine-tuned during 2009 and a countercheck with province administrations concluded with the total number of registered companies in the inventory being revised to 36 000.

Establishment of the inventory was supported by a comprehensive capacity building campaign for key stakeholders from the public and private sectors, targeting staff that will be involved in using the inventory to monitor, control, treat and dispose of Turkey’s hazardous waste. An exhaustive set of manuals and guidelines was published to help mainstream and sustain this new institutional knowledge.

Longer term horizons were also assisted by the project’s preparation of a broader planning concept for coordinating the management of the country’s hazardous waste streams. This identifies regional needs linked to different waste streams and is being progressed by bilateral donors as part of a five year plan to plug the gaps in Turkey’s waste management infrastructure.

View the HAWAMAN website for additional information.

Improvement of Industrial Hazardous Waste Management in Turkey
LIFE06 TCY/TR/000292