Türkiye: The Turkish Cement Manufacturers' Association (Türkçimento) has issued a strategic statement addressing the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), calling for EU recognition of Türkiye’s national monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) emissions data to ensure fair competition. The association warned that current EU CBAM default emission values may overstate actual emissions from Turkish cement producers, potentially increasing carbon costs from around €20/t to €80/t of clinker. It said that this could threaten the economic sustainability of exports to the EU.
Türkçimento CEO Volkan Bozay said that Türkiye’s cement sector has operated within an EU-aligned MRV system since 2015 and that low-emission dry-process kilns are used at all of its facilities. He said that actual export data for exports to the EU during the CBAM transition period showed that emissions for grey cement clinker are around 0.88t of CO₂ per tonne of cement, while the default value of 1.551t of CO₂ per tonne is applied to Türkiye under the ‘other countries’ category. He said the difference creates additional costs that do not reflect actual emission performance and could ultimately increase prices for EU consumers.
He added "To prevent CBAM from becoming a de facto trade barrier, national values based on EU-aligned MRV data should be used instead of general 'other countries' default values. Until the verification infrastructure becomes fully operational, actual emission data should be taken as the basis and disproportionate financial burdens should be avoided. Otherwise, as a system that fails to distinguish between low-carbon production and the most carbon-intensive production, CBAM will not effectively support low-carbon manufacturing and may instead function as a non-tariff technical barrier.”
