Local materials in 3rd Istanbul Airport reach 80 percent

Yusuf Akçayoğlu, CEO of IGA (Istanbul Grand Airport) Airport Construction, who is in charge of the project, stated that they are working with nearly a thousand Turkish companies and stated that they are "directly related to 400 domestic producers." This is one of the biggest projects of the Republic's history and at the same time they are working with local producers and global companies. It also provides added value from the perspective," he said.

As 38 percent of the construction of Istanbul's Third Airport is being completed, the amount of locally-produced materials has reached 80 percent.

The first stage will cost 6 billion euros, and a substantial part of the construction costs will remain in Turkey.

A claim that imported marble is being installed in the airport project is absolutely unfounded. “International aeronautical rules apply to the construction of airports. Marble, for example, is not a suitable material for intensive passenger traffic in terms of strength. We changed the project in order to integrate native marble. For this purpose, we are not installing it in the passenger terminal but in additional service buildings," Akçayoğlu explained.

The total area in the airport that was planned to be covered by granite is 450,000 square meters. Yusuf Akçayoğlu recounted their search for the correct domestically-mined granite: “We took the samples from quarries recommended by the Mining Exporters' Association and had tests performed. However, we could not find a quarry fulfilling our requirements for the capacity and radiation level of the granite. We then called a quarry in Van, from which we purchased 15,000 square meters of granite in accordance with the characteristics and legal procedures' acceptable radiation rate."

In order to utilize domestically produced products in all the remaining spaces in the airport terminal, we gave a sample of a state-of-the-art ceramic from Italy to our producers in Turkey. After months of R&D work, we agreed with Kütahya Ceramic for the area of 350,000 square meters and started to produce our ceramics.

IGA used granite imported from Brazil only for an 85,000-square-meter area located at the terminal building's entrance. The sum of $4,250,000 was paid for the granite, which was agreed on at a price of $50 per square meter.