GAZIANTEP — With Turkish and EU flags everywhere and a band playing, Gaziantep Mayor Fatma Sahin, flanked by EU and UN representatives, cut the ribbon of an EU-funded waste management facility earlier this week, providing a rosy picture of cooperation amid tense EU-Turkey ties.

The $10 million Mechanical Biological Treatment and Biogas Facility, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, aims to help the municipality cope with waste, after the city’s population swelled with half a million Syrians — the second-largest Syrian community in Turkey after Istanbul. 

Gaziantep, a historical trade and cultural center located on the border with Syria, traditionally had strong socioeconomic ties with Aleppo. What started in 2011 with 252 people from Aleppo reached 450,000 Syrians under temporary protection within 10 years. The locals of this southeastern metropolis of 2.2 million now point out that one in four people on the streets is Syrian.

“The city’s waste has increased by 25%,” Sahin, a native of the city who was handpicked by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to run for mayor in 2014, said at the ceremony on Sept. 5. “The facility will help us deliver essential public services. But more than that, it will show that we can manage other challenges posed by the sudden expansion in the city’s population.”