1. INTRODUCTION

Following Green Peace's actions started on the purpose of preventing polluting natural resources more in 2011, states, international other organizations and large-scale companies started to create and express their own action plans. Many countries and states started to pay importance on the concept of "sustainability" in order not to face a great disaster in the future and to take necessary precautions in advance.

Sustainability concept is expressed as proceeding of an institution by taking steps to positively affect economic development, human lives and especially environmental balance in terms of interaction of dynamics with one another by taking into consideration economic, social and environmental dynamics. (Toksöz, Mezarcıöz,2013).

As is in all modern industries, substances released to the environment by the textile producers are also generally not harmless. Hence; the procedures of recovery adaptation in terms of decreasing environmental damages and decreasing resource consumption for ecologic protection, usage of environmentally friendly fibers or other materials, reducing the amount of pollution formed and developing methods to remove after the pollution occurs gain importance with each passing day.

Turkish ready-made clothing sector is structure gaining strength and growing each passing day by means of production value, employment provided, share in country's export and world's ready-made clothing sector and supplier identity. Therefore, taking vision holder and firm steps in sustainability field rapidly has great importance for Turkish textile sector.

2.  SUSTAINABILITY IN TEXTILE

High rates of chemical load and waste water and environmental impacts given to the environment by the textile industry known to be one of the industries polluting the environment at high rate are high. Other important factors in textile industry confront us as energy consumption, air pollution, solid waste and odor formation.

When environmental problems in relation to textile and ready-made clothing sector are inspected, they cause environmental problems in nearly each process from the emissions in the production of pesticides and synthetic fibers used in growing the natural fibers to becoming a product. Liquid wastes, fibers and organic and suspended pollution loads in a considerable level originated majorly from washing procedures are held under these problems occurring (http://www.greenpoint.com.tr).

Such liquid wastes used in textile industry are generally hot, alkaline and odorous. A part of chemicals released in environment as wastes is toxic and they have the qualities to decrease dissolved oxygen amount in water, threaten aquatic life and reduce general water quality.  In addition to them, there are emissions, especially Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), excessive noise or odor (https://www.ihkib.org.tr).

Nowadays, within the scope of sustainability, many concepts such as "Green Textiles", "Organic Textiles", "Ecologic Textiles", "Ecologic Design", "Design For Environment", "Design for Sustainability- D4S", "Life Cycle Assessment- LCA" are included within sustainability in textile industry (İşmal, Yıldırım, 2012).

Although synthetics are considered as the raw material group creating the greatest problems in terms of environment in textile industry, natural fibers form various problems in terms of environment. They cause reactions of environmentalists due to reasons such as environmental damages caused by pesticides used in the production of cotton, which is natural fiber produced and consumed the most as well as polyester, which is synthetic fiber group (dying of beneficial organisms, causing fish death, leakage to underwater etc.), environmental impacts caused by genetically modified cotton production and chemical-based fertilizer usage. Although cotton disintegrates a shorter period in nature compared to synthetics, environmental damages caused by production process and usage of 29% pesticides used in Turkey in cotton production damage "green" image of cotton fiber (Altun, 2016).

For the solution of this gradually increasing problem in textile industry, sustainable materials and production methods are required to be used. For this, cyclic material flow should be adopted instead of using conventional materials and methods and usage of materials achieved by recycling should be preferred (Eser et. al., 2016:47).

"Textile ecology" concept constitutes an important place in order to provide sustainability in textile. When ecology is mentioned in textile, human ecology and waste ecology come to mind. The issues such as producing the raw materials to be used here in environmental friendly conditions, selecting chemicals to be used in processes from the products not to harm the environment, producing clothes not to harm human health and not to harm humans, fulfilling recycling processes by wastes occurring during production and waste clothes occurring after usage of the consumers are very important in terms of sustainability in textile (Kurtoğlu et. al., 2004).

3. CU TEXTILE DESIGN CENTER and SUSTAINABILITY WORKS

Cu Textile was established in 2006 in Izmir and became active in ready-made clothing sector. It performs designing and export of baby, children, women and men clothing by knit fabric. It mainly designs and exports for companies such as Spanish Inditex Group (Zara, Bershka, BSK etc.), which is leading fast fashion movement and for companies centered in Germany, Spain, France, England, Netherlands and Sweden. Cu Textile designing and selling fashion to leading buyers of Europe has taken its place in the greatest 1000 exporter companies of Turkey since 2011.

Cu Textile has succeeded in creating a different and unique style from designing to production of its products in ready-made clothing sector by its fast and quality service understanding since its establishment. From this aspect, it takes extremely active role in transferring rapidly changing fashion understanding in our country and in the world into the products. It makes difference by systematizing the structure depending on the person in fashion and ready-made clothing sector with the products designed. Designs are updated frequently by innovative works taking into consideration the customer needs and seasonal differences.

Cu textile continues to maintain its works according to the standards by taking ISO 9001:2015, ISO 13485:2016 and CE Certificates in 2020 as well as certification and quality documents such as BSCI, SEDEX, ISO 9001 and ISO27001. Cu Textile gathers all design activities by creating a separate physical area within current building in order to conduct design-directed working structure on more systematic and project basis. It is awarded to be Design Center as of 10/03/2017 by the Ministry of Industry and Technology due to its Design Center structure created by this work. It conducts 58 design projects since 2017. 12 of these projects are based on sustainability.

Especially when we consider that fashion and textile sector we are in is in the second rank in terms of wastes and pollution of resources; we, as Cu Textile Design Center, also start to primarily conduct sustainable product and process designs in our projects. In this context, 4 of 8 current on-going projects in our design center are focused on sustainability.

When we inspect the projects we conduct on sustainability in our design center;it is intended that all life-cycle of a product is designed in advance and systematically in accordance with the ecologic standards by developing high value-added knit clothing product designs for women and children in a manner to deal the process in detail from material selection to product packaging, product life, recycling of products with expired lifetime in accordance with the concept of design for the environment (Design for the Environment- DfE) in the project named Development According To "Environment Friendly Design Approach" of Women's and Children's Clothing Designs".