The Textile Industry and Sustainable Development: A Holt-Winters Forecasting Investigation for the Eastern European Area

To achieve sustainable development, massive changes towards fostering a clean and pollution-reducing industrial sector are quintessential. The textile industry has been one of the main contributors to water pollution all over the world, causing more than 20% of the registered levels of water pollution in countries like Turkey, Indonesia and China (among the G20 group of countries) and also in Romania and Bulgaria (in the Eastern European area), with even more than 44% in Macedonia. Given the controversy created by the textile industry's contribution to pollution at a global level and also the need to diminish pollution in order to promote sustainable development, this paper comparatively investigates the contribution of the textile industry to the water pollution across Central and Eastern European countries, as well as developed countries. In addition, we employ the Holt-Winters model to forecast the trend of the total emissions of organic water pollutants, as well as of the textile industry's contribution to pollution for the top polluters in Eastern Europe, i.e., Poland and Romania. According to our estimates, both countries are headed towards complete elimination of pollution caused by the textile industry and, hence, toward a more sustainable industrial sector, as Greenpeace intended with the release of its 2011 reports.