ISTAC ISTANBUL CEVRE YONETIM SANAYIVE TICARET AS

Their core work

ISTAC (İstanbul Çevre Yönetim Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş.) is Istanbul's primary municipal environmental and waste management operator, responsible for solid waste collection, processing, and recycling infrastructure serving a city of over 15 million people. In H2020, they contribute as a real-world operational partner — first as an urban actor in circular economy and community production experiments, then as an industrial-scale end-of-life resource handler in a pre-commercial pilot for recovering platinum-group metals from spent automotive catalysts, photovoltaic panels, and electronic waste. Their core value to research consortia is not technology development but access: they own and operate the infrastructure through which large volumes of urban end-of-life materials flow, making them an essential testbed partner for any project that needs to validate recovery technologies at city scale.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

ISTAC entered H2020 through Pop-Machina (2019), where the focus was urban community innovation — makerspaces, collaborative production, and the factory of the future as tools for circular city planning. By 2021, their focus shifted sharply and specifically to industrial materials recovery: extracting platinum-group metals from spent catalysts, WEEE, solar panels, and circuit boards. This is not a random pivot — it follows a logical internal trajectory from "waste as a city planning problem" toward "waste as a source of recoverable high-value materials," reflecting a growing industrial ambition beyond basic collection and landfill.

ISTAC is moving from broad urban circular economy engagement toward industrial-scale critical raw materials recovery, suggesting future projects in urban mining, WEEE processing, and battery or photovoltaic end-of-life infrastructure would be a natural fit.

How they like to work

ISTAC participates exclusively as a consortium member — never as a coordinator — across both projects. With 42 unique partners spanning 11 countries from just two projects, they consistently join large, multi-national Innovation Action consortia rather than small specialist groups. This pattern is typical of large urban operators who join research consortia to provide infrastructure access and real-world validation capacity, rather than driving the scientific agenda themselves.

ISTAC has connected with 42 consortium partners across 11 countries through just two projects — an unusually broad network for such a limited project portfolio, reflecting the large, geographically diverse consortia typical of European Innovation Actions. As a Turkish organization, they also provide non-EU urban market access that can be strategically valuable for consortia seeking geographic breadth.

What sets them apart

ISTAC's differentiator is scale and geography: as the operator behind Istanbul's citywide waste management system, they provide access to end-of-life material volumes that most research partners cannot match — automotive catalysts, WEEE, photovoltaics, and electronic scrap at municipal throughput. For a consortium building a pre-commercial pilot that needs a real and large urban waste stream to work with, ISTAC is not interchangeable with a smaller recycler or a university lab. Their Turkish base also opens a large non-EU urban market that broadens a project's claimed impact and geographic diversity.

Highlights from their portfolio

• PEACOC
  A pre-commercial pilot targeting high-value platinum-group metals from multiple complex end-of-life streams simultaneously — one of the more commercially ambitious critical raw materials projects in H2020, and ISTAC's largest funding award at EUR 149,341.
• Pop-Machina
  An unusual pairing of a large municipal waste operator with makerspace and collaborative production research, revealing ISTAC's early ambition to position Istanbul as a circular economy urban laboratory beyond conventional waste management.