Working together for a clean environment

Dealing with solid waste is a major challenge for many Turkish municipalities. This is also the case in Karesi, an industrialised city with a population of 180,000. High population growth, new building developments, more and more building rubble and an inadequate recycling rate: all this leads to an ever-increasing volume of waste. Following the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the city took in around 2,000 registered refugees – including many women and children.

The partner municipalities Schwäbisch Hall and Karesi decided to work in two areas. Firstly, support was to be provided to Karesi in the area of waste avoidance, sorting and disposal through inter-municipal expert exchanges. The second focus was on raising awareness for sustainability-related themes among young people.

On the first delegation trip, eight Turkish experts travelled to Schwäbisch Hall in 2019. At various stop-offs in the German partner municipality they learned about waste separation and disposal as well as organic waste recycling. Working together with the experts from the two local authorities, the project specifically targeted school students in Karesi.

Afterwards, the young people passed on their knowledge and creative ideas to others of the same age – both with and without refugee backgrounds. Inspired by the impressions gained in excursions and joint activities, they established an environmental protection group that among other things campaigned for the installation of reverse vending machines in Karesi. The students were also very much interested in upcycling, and in a workshop with young refugees, Tetra Paks were transformed into briefcases.

Following the municipal elections in Karesi in 2019, many local authority staff moved to other sectoral departments with the result that a delegation trip by German experts had to be put on hold. But for Karin Eißele-Kraft, Head of Citizens’ Affairs, Equal Opportunities and Municipal Partnerships in Schwäbisch Hall, there was an upside. From her perspective, new appointments in the partner municipality generate additional momentum. “We now have new contacts and can scale up our activities once more.” Karin Eißele-Kraft is convinced that youth education in connection with waste avoidance and climate-change mitigation will continue to be a key theme of the municipal partnership in future.

With the Partnership for a Clean Environment project, which is funded through the Middle East Quick-starter Package I, we have succeeding in making many experts and young people in Karesi more aware of the importance of waste management. However, the transfer of knowledge was not a one-way street, as the German project partners were able to report. They were impressed by the activities in Karesi, for instance an outdoor film evening on the theme of waste, and a waste party at which dedicated stakeholders were shown appreciation for their efforts, and the theme was put firmly in the spotlight.

“We took on board many new ideas from the reports about the rapid implementation of the lessons learned in Turkey,” says Karin Eißele-Kraft. And in her view this was necessary, as the discipline required to avoid and separate waste is unfortunately on the wane once more here in Germany.