Türkiye maps a carbon capture path for municipal waste

Türkiye generates more than 32 million tons of municipal waste annually, the scale underpinning a COP31 proposal to retrofit waste-to-energy plants with carbon capture. At a dedicated Türkiye Academy Pavilion panel during COP31, researchers and policy experts presented a roadmap for introducing carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) to the country.

The proposal drew on a new discussion paper examining Türkiye’s municipal waste system. Speakers identified retrofits at established waste-to-energy (WtE) facilities as the logical first step for Turkish carbon management, despite CCUS remaining largely absent from the country’s industrial landscape. The panel contrasted that domestic gap with rapid CCUS scaling across North America and Northern Europe.

Istanbul supplies an operating base for that argument. Panelists cited the city’s WtE facility, one of the region’s largest, as evidence that the underlying technology is commercially mature.

Modern WtE plants hygienically incinerate residual waste to generate electricity and district heat. Panelists contrasted that model with landfills, which consume vast tracts of land and emit potent methane gas.

The comparison was financial as well as environmental. Panelists described landfill as a low-cost option burdened by methane emissions, while WtE-CCS would combine energy recovery with carbon management at an operating municipal asset.

Carbon capture would change the climate calculation at those plants. Capturing fossil CO2 from burned plastics would abate hard-to-reduce emissions, while capturing biogenic CO2 from paper and organic matter would permanently sequester carbon and turn the facility into a net-negative carbon removal engine.

What must happen before Türkiye’s waste-to-energy carbon capture can scale?

Three linked workstreams stand between the panel’s proposal and deployment, beginning with end-to-end infrastructure. Capture units at municipal plants must connect to dedicated CO2 transport routes, utilization pathways and certified geological storage sites.

Scale makes that requirement more demanding than a single plant retrofit. Capture at one incinerator still needs a transport route and a certified place to store the gas, or a defined pathway for its use. The panel treated the complete chain as a prerequisite for verifiable removals.

The second constraint is bankable project structure. Oxford researcher Emre Hoca said: “The primary bottleneck in climate technology is rarely a lack of available capital, but rather a shortage of ‘bankable’ projects.” His point separates the general availability of capital from the harder task of creating projects investors can finance.

Istanbul’s existing WtE facility offers a financing precedent. It leveraged blended finance from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank, showing how multilateral support can accompany municipal waste infrastructure.

The precedent does not transfer automatically to a carbon capture upgrade. The panel linked additional capital to predictable revenue, policy backing and a municipal-private partnership structure.

Those features would give international development banks and private investors a basis to commit. Without them, a mature waste facility alone does not create a financeable CCS project.

The third workstream is broader understanding. Panelists called for wider awareness of the sector’s economic and climate value, framing the benefits for businesses, the wider economy and society as central to moving municipal authorities away from low-cost landfilling.

That move would align policymakers, local authorities and industry around higher-value waste recovery and carbon management. In the panel’s framing, urban waste could shift from an environmental liability to a cornerstone of Türkiye’s net-zero transition.

The roadmap is therefore a sequence of investment and policy tests, not a finished asset. Each retrofit must connect a municipal incinerator to capture, a route for CO2, a certified destination and a contracted revenue model before operators can claim removals.

The decisive next milestone is a financeable, policy-backed project that covers the full CO2 chain and secures certified geological storage. Until that milestone, the proposal remains an entry point for Türkiye’s carbon management sector rather than operating WtE-CCS capacity.