The Zero Waste Project championed by first lady Emine Erdoğan has been a huge success, but most importantly has become an inspiration.
Students at the Antalya Science and Art School wanted to prevent the immense waste that people produce everyday, so they came up with a brilliant idea: A cleaning product made of fruit pulp.
Ada Yeşilyurt and Sude Şeran teamed up together, and with the help of their teacher Sedat Altaş they began to mix different fruit pulps to find the perfect match for their project. In the end, the students decided to enter the competition organized by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TÜBİTAK) and became finalists.
However, cleaning products are not the only things that Yeşilyurt and Şeran's project can offer. Thanks to their enzyme project, fruit pulp can be used to produce fertilizer or even perfumes.
Offering insight into their work, Ada Yeşilyurt said: "The enzyme project allows us to come up with a variety of products. For instance, using orange pulp, we can produce a perfume, and this perfume repels certain bugs. On the other hand, the waste parts of a banana can be used in agriculture as well as cleaning thanks to the potassium it contains. We also used waste paper in our project mixed with basil and got an incredible fertilizer."
Also speaking to the press, teacher Sedat Altaş said oranges are abundant in Antalya, but after eating the sweet part, people often throw out the rest. "Some make jam out of the outer skins of oranges, but most of the time they are wasted. This gave my students an idea to turn this waste into a new product. The project showed us that this enzyme process could be adapted to all food waste. Plants can be recycled up to 40 percent, and we plan to make use of it as much as we can," Altaş added.
