Video From Turkey Showing Underground Garbage Bins Shared as Karnataka

While some cities in India do have an underground garbage bin system, the viral video is not from here.

Fact-Check | A video showing underground garbage bins in Turkey has been shared as that from Karnataka's Belagavi (Belgaum).

(Photo: The Quint)

A video showing a person removing garbage from an underground garbage bin has been shared by several social media users with a claim that it shows an experimental system that was started in Karnataka's Belgaum (also known as Belagavi).

However, we found that the video, which dates back to 2013, showed the underground garbage bins in Turkey. The video was uploaded on Twitter by a Turkish company called Hidro-Mak that makes garbage compactors.

CLAIM

Those sharing the video wrote a caption in Marathi that loosely translates to, "Innovative experiment of Belgaum Municipal Corporation. Underground garbage container."

An archive of the post can be found here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

Several other social media users also shared the same claim along with the video, archives of which can be found here, here, and here. We also received a query on our WhatsApp tipline to check the authenticity of the video.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We fragmented the video into keyframes using the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension and conducted a reverse image search of some of the keyframes using Yandex. We found a YouTube video posted by a channel called Hidro-Mak that carried the same video.

The video, which was uploaded on 26 August 2013, was titled, "Rear Loader Refuse Truck with Crane for Underground Container." The description said that Hidro-Mak was a Turkish company that made garbage compactors.

The number plate of the truck (34 EF 4247) also showed that it was a Turkish vehicle. The number plates that begin with 34 are from Istanbul. We also spoted the words "Üsküdar Belediyesi" written on the truck, which is a municipality in Istanbul, Turkey.

A link to the video can be found here.

(Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

We then conducted a Google search for underground garbage bins in Belgaum and found an article published in a website called "All about Belgaum".

The article published in February said that a proposal for setting up underground garbage containers had been floated by the Belagavi city corporation.

However, there were no reports that stated that such a system was in place in Belagavi. A similar system, however, has been in place in some cities like Surat, which had installed 43 underground garbage bins to manage its waste. Other cities with a similar system are Dharamshala, Panchkula, and Dehradun.

Evidently, a video showing the underground garbage disposal bins installed in Turkey has been shared by several social media users as that in Karnataka's Belagavi.

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