Turkey is striving to spread first lady Emine Erdoğan’s Zero Waste Project, which involves recycling everything that can be recycled in recent years. Hiba Sinem Demirkan, a teacher living in Istanbul, shows the fight starts at home to minimize the damage to nature and giving back to the economy.

In four years, she converted the food waste in her home to hundreds of kilograms of compost, contributing to the struggle to end food waste in the country.

Food, especially bread, is almost sacred in Turkish culture; yet, it accompanies an emerging culture of excess consumption and a disregard for recycling practices. Unconfirmed figures show the country wastes more than 11 million tons of food every year. Food waste also has an indirect impact on other aspects of life, such as being a waste of time, energy, labor, money and natural resources used in its production.

Demirkan, who is also a volunteer at the Wheat Association, an Istanbul-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) for sustainable living, said people tend to put all household garbage in one bag and think "they got rid of it." "But they never really disappear," she said.

United Nations figures show every year, some 931 million tons of food go to waste and 61% of food waste stems from households, while sources of the remaining food waste are eateries and wholesale food sellers. Food waste, from peels of fruits and vegetables to leftovers of tea and coffee, eggshells, fruits and vegetables not stored properly and becoming rotten, can be recycled into compost, an organic fertilizer.

Demirkan credits her habit of compost production to her father, who lives in the southwestern province of Muğla where the other family members have been engaged in compost production since 2011. "One day, my father came home and told us that we would bury all the leftover food into the soil. We were puzzled and opposed it because it was wrong to bury garbage but then he explained to us how to make compost," she told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Monday.

When she moved to Istanbul, she continued the family tradition, in a city where "food consumption is high." "I did not want to contribute to the food waste here," she said.

"What we call waste is actually raw material. You cannot see nature generating its own garbage. You cannot see leaves that fell in autumn coming back in the spring. They decompose and disintegrate once they fell. In a way, I am mimicking nature," she added.

With a few simple mechanisms, such as a bucket and a filter, Demirkan set up a compost "facility" at home. She separated waste into "green" and "brown," with vegetable and fruit waste, herbs, and leftovers of brewed tea making up "green" waste while tree bark, branches, toilet paper rolls, leftovers of dried fruits and dried leaves make up the "brown" part.

Sometimes, she resorts to the "bokashi" method, which involves converting the organic waste into a soil amendment, by fermenting it with bacteria. "You need a bucket and a filter for this, to discharge the water inside the waste. You then seal off the bucket, to keep the air out of it. The next step is extracting beneficial microorganism liquids through a tap you install in the bucket. The liquid can be extracted after making a kind of ‘sandwich’ between the carbon material at the top of the filter and the food waste at the bottom of the filter. It is stored for 15 days, with regular discharges of liquid. The derived liquid can also be used separately to water the plants," she explained. In the end, organic compost is created with no additives.

Another method called worm composting or vermicompost involves the decomposition of food waste by using worms, specifically grown for this purpose. The waste derived from worm composting is regularly watered, to help the worms eat scraps of food waste and excrete the nutrient-rich compost in the process.

Demirkan uses the compost for plants she grows on her balcony and hands over the excess compost to friends.

"A city resident contributes to the generation of about 1.5 kilograms (3.31 pounds) of garbage daily and 60% of it is organic waste. This is a significant rate and sufficient for compost production. When I found out that the formation of a centimeter of soil takes up to 500 years, I decided to give more thought to compost production. In four years, I made hundreds of kilograms of soil. This is a great amount, and if more people do it, it will be far greater," she said.