Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality is the first plant in Turkey that produces yarn completely out of recycled plastic bottles. Having started as a family firm in 2009, IBB exports to 20 countries. Plastic bottles used by the company are collected from several locations, such as schools, hospitals, hotels and various institutions, and then processed in fiber.

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. Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality aims to increase the volume of renewable waste collected from people through a new system that will refund the value of each recycling deposit to the resident's megacity transport card.

Increasing yarn production contributes to the Turkish economy. The yarn, which is internationally-accredited and certified, is not produced using conventional methods. In a feat of process engineering, IBB has used self-developed knowhow to transform plastic waste into fiber and yarn. IBB’s daily production capacity is five tons of yarn and it wants to raise it to 20 tons by 2019 and 40 tons by 2020. The company processes around 200 tons of plastic bottles monthly and aims at increasing this figure to 1,000 tons by 2020.