Ankara: In a shifting landscape of international aid, the dismantling of USAID in 2025, alongside simultaneous aid cuts by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, has highlighted the structural shortcomings within the global development system.
According to Anadolu Agency, the retreat of traditional aid architecture has created an opportunity to explore alternative development models, particularly in the domain of waste management.
The OECD projects a 28 percent decline in official development assistance by 2026, with alarming predictions from Rasella et al. (2026) estimating 9.4 million excess deaths by 2030 due to current funding trajectories. This has moved the debate from academic speculation into a pressing political reality. The retreat of traditional aid systems provides a structural opportunity to reimagine development cooperation, with waste management emerging as a promising area for innovation.
The concept of zero waste offers a paradigmatic shift by focusing on what already exists rather than on deficits. This approach is already a labor market reality, employing between 121 and 142 million people globally in the circular economy, according to Employment in the Circular Economy: Leveraging Circularity to Create Decent Work (ILO, Circle Economy, and World Bank, 2025). The zero waste framework emphasizes community-driven development, measuring productive capacity rather than outputs like contracts or facilities.
Trkiye's zero waste initiative, launched in 2017 by Turkish first lady Emine Erdogan, serves as an empirical model for this new development paradigm. The program expanded from a pilot in public institutions to a national system in over 205,000 buildings, increasing the recycling recovery rate from 13 percent in 2017 to 37.5 percent in 2025. By 2035, the target is set at 60 percent. The initiative has returned 90 million tons of waste to the economy, generating $8 billion, preventing 180 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, and saving two trillion liters of water.
Trkiye's model has been extended through TIKA to nearly 100 projects in over 50 countries, recognizing and formalizing the work of the informal waste sector, which employs 15 to 20 million people globally. This initiative emphasizes adaptive rather than prescriptive transfer, focusing on local capacity building and autonomy.
The zero waste paradigm challenges traditional development cooperation by transforming waste into a resource that sustains livelihoods and generates wealth. It aligns with the dual objectives of development cooperation: to enhance benefits and reduce harm. As traditional aid systems retreat, zero waste offers a viable alternative to address global wastefulness and economic inequality.