First Lady Emine Erdoğan, who is accompanying President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the U.S., attended the opening ceremony of the Climate Week New York City 2026.
Speaking at the event, First Lady Erdoğan voiced her pleasure over being in this important gathering, which has brought together people assuming responsibilities for the world, and noted that the climate change is one of the most visible results of the heavy burden caused by people’s activities in the world.
Underscoring that the climate change is, first and foremost, the outcome of the change of people’s spiritual climate, First Lady Erdoğan said: “That is so because we have established an order that has acknowledged from the very beginning that everything we produce has a short lifespan, and that every object will turn to trash one day. That the 7 billion tons of the nearly 9.2 billion tons of plastics, which have been produced in the world since 1950s, have turned into waste clearly shows the cost caused by this understanding. What is more, this burden is not fairly distributed in the world. Environmental costs caused by heavy consumption levels are left on the shoulders of fragile geographies, future generations and societies, which receive the least share from this consumption. Therefore, we should start by reducing the extremes in our habits as well as our wastes, and by changing our mentalities as well as systems. We should rebuild our relation with the nature on balance and justice.”
Stressing that the Zero Waste Movement was born out of this understanding, Mrs. Erdoğan went on to say: “This project has emerged as a moral stance that reminds boundaries and responsibilities in an age when consumption and waste have each become a usual part of life. The zero waste practices, which we launched at our Presidential Complex in 2017, have spread to schools, hospitals, municipalities, public institutions and houses in a short span of time. Our recycling rate, which was 13 per cent in that period, has today increased to over 37 per cent. Obviously, this transformation has numerous outcomes that can be defined by numbers, but our actual gain here is that people seeing that they could be the subject of the change, not just a party to it.”
“The Zero Waste Movement has turned people from being a desperate observer in the face of the climate crisis into the leading actor of the solution. It has proven that seemingly small behavioral changes can turn into a social culture when they are spread, and into a lasting system when they are supported with accurate policies,” First Lady Erdoğan added.
