I grew up in Istanbul, eighteen million people, beautiful and chaotically alive, but with almost no nature around me. Maybe that's exactly why I started caring about it so much.
It began small. A zero-waste blog, tracking my own trash, once living three months completely zero-waste (a little extreme, honestly). But following where my coffee grounds and cooking oil actually went pulled me into a much bigger question: how does a whole city handle what it throws away? That question never really let me go.
Two startups, one obsession
That question turned into companies. I co-founded Katık, a smart waste platform connecting households, haulers, and recyclers through route optimization and incentives, built around Turkey's goal of lifting recycling rates from 15% toward 60%. Then Carboff, a digital carbon marketplace that let companies measure and offset their footprint by supporting verified climate projects, long before carbon tooling went mainstream.
Both taught me the same lesson from different angles: climate action only works when the numbers behind it are honest, and when someone can actually understand and act on them.
Where science met the real world
I went deeper, into a Master's in Environmental Science at Boğaziçi University, one of Turkey's most rigorous programs, focused on where climate systems, data, and urban futures meet. Alongside my studies I volunteered at the university's Climate Change and Policy Studies Center.
The most formative part wasn't in a classroom. Every week I co-hosted a live climate broadcast, "Son Buzul Erimeden" (Before the Last Glacier Melts), with the center's director and my professor Levent Kurnaz. On air, in real time, we broke down current climate data and what it actually meant. That's where my love for turning raw climate data into something people can understand truly took hold.
How CarbonSquare began
Then I moved to Amsterdam, and CarbonSquare started almost by accident. I simply wanted to measure the emissions of my own small e-commerce business, so I built my own footprint report. That one report turned into a method. The method turned into this.
Today I build environmental impact assessments for circular startups. Circular founders are chasing one of the hardest questions there is: how do we reverse overconsumption using what we already have? Their ideas are inventive, future-facing, and smart, and helping them prove their impact, honestly and credibly, is exactly the work I want to be doing.
My environmental science background shapes the integrity of that work. My startup experience shapes how usable it is. And the whole reason CarbonSquare exists is a belief that took me years to arrive at: a number you can actually defend is worth far more than a number that just looks impressive.