Turkish textile and ready-wear industry identification of opinions and problems regarding the European Green Deal

The European Union focuses on implementing its actions on climate change more broadly and effectively. The European Union, which is a pioneer in sustainability for this focus, has implemented the 'European Green Deal' action plan. The European Union, which set the goal of becoming the first climate-neutral continent in 2050 with the Green Deal, announced the 'EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textile' for the textile and ready-made clothing sector. It is important for the country's exports that the Turkish textile and ready-made clothing industry, which ranks fifth in world trade, is prepared within the scope of this strategy. This study was planned and carried out to determine the opinions and problems of the Turkish textile and ready-made clothing industry regarding the European Green Deal. The data of this descriptive research was obtained from 39 exporting enterprises through a survey developed by the researcher. It has been determined that the businesses participating in the research have mostly started to implement European Green Deal requirements in processes related to sustainable eco-design processes, inventory information, waste management and human resources, and are mostly at the planning stage in carbon emission processes. In their opinions about the problems they encountered, it was seen that they had problems with the increase in product diversity and the quality of raw material supply in the supply chain, and in their opinions about the expectations of the businesses, it was seen that they needed support in terms of being supported by customers with high volume orders, access to finance and incentives in the field of sustainability. A relationship analysis was conducted between the requirements of the green agreement and the variables of the business processes, main product groups, export countries, necessary certificates and social audit initiatives. As a result of these analyses, a statistically significant difference was detected in sustainable product - eco design, inventory information and carbon emission processes according to the activity duration variable. No statistically significant difference was detected between other processes and variables.