Any product or space once created can have more than one life. Recycling is that one very useful phenomenon that helps to give second or third lives to many things. Keeping that in view, the local authorities in the North-Central city of Trabzon in Turkey are taking their recycling game to another level. The authorities are using a plane for their recycling or repurposing plan. At the beginning of this year, an aeroplane from Pegasus Airlines’ Boeing 737-800 skid off the runway and stopped at the edge of a cliff while its nose was touching the Black Sea.
A passenger, Fatma Gordu, who was on the plane talked about the incident saying, “We stayed inside the plane for at least 20 minutes waiting for someone to help us, and after a period of ‘shaking’.It [the plane] then swung to one side, and the back of the plane moved in an upward direction. There was panic, and people were screaming.” All the 162 passengers and 6 crew members were evacuated safely after the incident, and no injuries were reported. The local mayor, Orhan Fevzi Gumrukcuoglu has requested the companies general manager, Mehmet Tevfik Nane, to present the plane to the city as a gift. He has requested the company to give the plane in a condition where it can be used as a library. He also quoted a reason saying, “Keeping it here will also erase the bad memories attached to the plane.”
The response appears to be in favour of the request. However, before the plane is turned into a library, there are some details on which the two parties have to agree beforehand. The mayor is trying to deal with the major issue of the lack of libraries in the city. Turkish locals are looking at several ways to overcome the lack of libraries by converting public spaces into the next library.
The town of Giresun is full of piggy banks that have toys and books for public use that people drop off. In the Aegean coastal town of Datca, there are boxes with sliding doors for people to drop off or pick books. In the capital Ankara, a group of some very civic minded and committed garbage collectors joined forces in April 2017 to rescue books which were bound for the nearest landfill. The books were around 5000 and will be donated to many schools and other public or private institutions throughout the city. The sense and spirit of taking literacy matters into one’s own hands appear to be strongly present throughout the Turkish people.
