First Lady Emine Erdoğan attended the COP31-IEA High-Level Energy Transition Dialogue meeting at the United Nations headquarters.
Speaking at the meeting, First Lady Erdoğan stated that historical footprints of humanity consist of waste today, and said: “We extract, process and consume resources. Throughout all these processes, we spend energy, and then we leave what we produce out of the system by turning them into waste. However, there is energy, natural resources and human labor in everything that we call waste. That is why we choose a very important theme every year at the celebrations we hold at the United Nations headquarters within the International Zero Waste Day to draw attention to this multidimensional waste. For instance, we have raised the issue of food waste to the global agenda this year, because each year an equivalent of 5.8 trillion plates of food is wasted globally without even being consumed, and we rarely associate food waste with energy waste.”
Describing humanity’s top priority as abandoning the throwaway culture, shaped around single-use products, Mrs. Erdoğan continued as follows: “We should switch to a sustainability culture to be shaped around long-lasting and durable products for the prosperity of all of us and for justice among generations. We might as well design production processes in a manner that will not generate waste. We can turn waste back into raw material and reintegrate into the system. At this point, nature itself is an excellent school for cyclicity, because nothing turns into waste in nature.”
