Every day, thousands of plastic bottles are saved from landfills and spun into 5 tons of yarn that are exported around the world from a textile firm in western Turkey's prominent industrial center Bursa.

"As a result of our long-standing research and development project, we have become the first plant in Turkey that produces yarn completely out of recycled plastic bottles," General Director Erman Ilıman told Anadolu Agency on Wednesday.

Having started up as a family firm in 2009, the company now exports its products to 20 countries.

"We didn't really expect this much interest in this product," admitted Ilıman, adding that the company initially faced challenges since the product had never before been marketed in Turkey.

"But we have arrived at a point where companies are reaching us without us doing anything. There is a great demand from abroad as well. Currently, because of the limits of our production capacity, we are unable to meet all export demands," he said.

The yarn, which is internationally-accredited and certified, could not be produced using conventional methods, Ilıman said.

"This is a feat of process engineering; we have used self-developed know-how to transform plastic waste into fiber and yarn."

The plastic bottles used by the company are collected from several locations, such as schools, hospitals, hotels and various institutions, and then processed in fiber.

"Our daily production capacity is 5 tons of yarn, and we want to raise it to 20 tons by 2019 and 40 tons by 2020," said Ilıman, adding that they processed around 200 tons of plastic bottles monthly and aimed at increasing this figure to 1,000 tons by 2020.

Useful in numerous sectors, such as industrial weaving and knitting as well as furnishing and curtain production, increasing yarn production contributes to the Turkish economy, Ilıman said.

Turkey has pioneered recycling efforts in recent years, both through awareness initiatives to empower individual consumers and also recycling infrastructure to take advantage of the resources discarded in the trash.

A recent effort by Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) aims to increase the volume of renewable waste collected from Istanbulites through a new system that will refund the value of each recycling deposit to the resident's megacity transport card.

Istanbul, which is home to nearly 15 million people, produces an average of 17,000 tons of domestic waste every day, out of which 6,000 tons are processed in IBB's garbage collection and recycling centers.