Representatives of Turkish industrialists have raised their voices, demanding that the law be lifted. Pointing out that factories used to make a considerable amount of money selling their recyclable waste, factory owners say the state should compensate them for their losses. The regulation aims to encourage factories to produce environmentally friendly products and make sure waste is effectively used and does not cause pollution. Under the law, meant to provide control over recyclable waste from factories, industrialists have to give waste to authorized firms or risk a TL 93,000 fine. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry sends a document to each factory, asking them to declare the amount of waste they have. The factory managers must fill out this document and send it back to the provincial department of environment and forestry. The factories then must give the waste to a company licensed by the local municipalities to collect waste. The ministry grants the factories a certain amount of time to document the amount of waste they have, and if the managers fail to return the forms in time they are levied an extra TL 7,764 fine. Introduced in 2004, the law on recyclable waste was not applied until 2008 due to resistance from industrialists. The government has turned down all objections and applications for the annulment of the law, and the Supreme Court of Appeals also dropped all cases against the government on the issue.
Mahmut Yılmaz, the head of the Organized Industrial Zones Supreme Board (OSBÜK), said the industrialists earned money from selling their recyclable waste, which they spent on necessary items, and called it normal for them to oppose the government's demands to this end. “This is unfair, and we have already conveyed our concerns to the government. We have an exchange operating under the Turkish Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges (TOBB), and firms can purchase recyclable waste from there.” The amount of recyclable waste just from the Marmara region alone is 200,000 tons every month; the value of recyclable waste from Bursa was TL 150 million in 2008. Recyclable waste includes a variety of products from cartons, glass, wood and plastic bottles to scrap iron.
