Page 27 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

Mehmet Emin Birpınar - Ersin Gürtepe

Transformation in Industry

Industry, which is one of the significant indicators of the production and
development power of a country, is also responsible for a large part of
environmental emissions. For the purpose of eliminating harmful emissions,
using resources more effectively and establishing alternative raw materials,
multi-dimensional changes have been made in the industry, which has reduced
both key input costs and environmental risks.

In the industrial transformation process, the EU full membership negotiation
process that was started in 2005 and the EU environment chapter that was
opened in 2009 played a driving role (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic
of Türkiye, 2022), and during that period, the environmental legislation of
Türkiye was developed to be compatible with the EU environmental legislation.
In this context, about a hundred regulations were implemented and hence
institutional and technical infrastructure was established. In this process,
the concepts such as clean production, integrated pollution prevention and
control (IPPC), green OIZ, industrial symbiosis, sustainable production and
consumption and zero pollution have been highlighted in this field.
As of 2005, many projects have been developed for an integrated pollution
prevention and control approach based on clean production, which is one of
the most key regulations providing for the effective use of energy and raw
materials in industrial activities and minimizing waste and emission generation,
and the EU best available techniques reference documents (BREFs) have been
translated into Turkish, and sectoral cleaner production guides have been
developed for industrialists and made available to them, and support has
been provided to make the national industrial infrastructure compatible with
low-carbon growth (Best available techniques reference documents; guides
on waste management).
On a sectoral basis, in the textile sector, which has a high water and energy
consumption, the first legal regulation was made in 2011 for the transition to
clean production, and in this context, companies are required to prepare their
clean production plans and submit them to the Ministry (Directorate General
of Environmental Management, 2015).
Given the data of 2021, as a consequence of the clean production activities
implemented by the enterprises serving in the textile sector, energy savings
that can meet the annual electrical energy of 55 households per ton of fabric,
along with the water savings that corresponds to 6 Olympic pools per day,
were provided, and hence producers could gain by reducing production
costs on the one hand, and environmental gains were obtained by reducing
pollutant emissions and natural resource use on the other hand.

12 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate