Bangladesh’s textile industry, driven by an export-focused approach and abundant labour, especially in the ready-made garment (RMG) sector, has significantly boosted the country’s economy. Despite challenges like safety issues, there has been improved compliance in recent years, making the RMG sector a significant contributor to GDP and export earnings.
Bangladesh can export $6 billion worth of garment items if it can locally process the 400,000 tonnes of recycled yarn and fabrics the local garment makers produce every year, experts said today.
They shared the data at a seminar on “Switch to upstream circularity dialogue: pre-consumer textile waste in Bangladesh” held at the Amari Hotel in Dhaka.
Garment exporters, researchers and senior government officials also attended the event organised under the Switch to Circular Economy Value Chains project (SWITCH2CE) in collaboration with Chatham House, Circle Economy and European Investment Bank.
At the event, the apparel manufacturers also want a ban on export of clothing wastages.
The exporters said they want to make garments from the wastes as the European nations—the major markets for Bangladesh—are making a law for importing apparels made from recycled yarn.
The recycled yarn and fabrics will create the next opportunity for Bangladesh as the international retailers and brands are preferring clothing items made from recycled yarn, said Faruque Hassan, president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA).
Moreover, making of garment items from recycled yarn will also help Bangladesh in obtaining the GSP Plus facility in the European Union (EU) as those garment items would be made following their guidelines, he said.
M Masrur Reaz, chairman of Policy Exchange Bangladesh, stressed the need for taking a holistic vision, which provides direction, clarity and stance of the country in terms of circularity for utilising the new opportunity.
Vidiya Amrit Khan, director of the BGMEA, said the circularity is going to be new normal of the garment industry to address the issues about sustainability, traceability and climate change.
Saber Hossain Chowdhury, chair of the parliamentary standing committee on the ministry of environment, forest and climate change and special envoy to the prime minister for climate change; Bernd Spanier, deputy head of mission of the delegation of European Union to Bangladesh; Mark Draeck, chief technical adviser on SWITCH2CE at UNIDO, and Holly Syrett, director of impact programmes and sustainability at Global Fashion Agenda, also spoke.
Extreme heat and flooding could erase $65 billion in apparel export earnings from four Asian countries by 2030, as workers struggle under high temperatures and factories close, research from Schroders and Cornell University showed on Wednesday.
The study also mapped out the supply chains of six unidentified global apparel brands operating in the four countries studied – Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan and Vietnam – and found all six would be hit materially. For one sample brand that could amount to 5% of annual group operating profits.
The findings should act as a wake-up call to both an apparel industry facing significant financial costs, and to investors confronted with sparse information on companies’ exposures, the report’s authors told Reuters.
“Among the suppliers and the buyers we talked to, not one had their eye on these two issues (heat and flooding),” said Jason Judd, executive director of Cornell Global Labor Institute.
“The climate response by the industry is all about mitigation, about emissions and recycling, and little or nothing with respect to flooding and heat,” Judd said.
Understanding climate-related physical risks to companies in a warming world is critical, but the process is in its infancy with few businesses disclosing enough information and few investors undertaking proper assessments.
“There is so little data on this … There are some [apparel] brands not disclosing the factory locations of their suppliers,” said Angus Bauer, Schroders’ head of sustainable investment research.
Bauer said Schroders, which manages more than 700 billion pounds ($874 billion) in assets, would increase engagement with companies over their disclosures and he called on firms to work with suppliers and policymakers to build adaptation strategies that consider the impact on workers.
Using projections, the researchers analysed future heat and flooding levels to estimate what would happen under a “climate adaptive” scenario and a “high heat and flooding” scenario.
Under the second, workers would suffer more “heat stress”, with worker output declining as the wet-bulb globe temperature, which measures heat and humidity, rises.
Flooding will also force factories to close in the four countries, which account for 18% of global apparel exports and employ 10.6 million workers in apparel and footwear factories.
The overall fall in productivity would lead to a $65 billion shortfall in projected earnings between 2025 and 2030 – equivalent to a 22% decline – and 950,000 fewer jobs being created, the study found.
By 2050, lost export earnings would reach 68.6% and there would be 8.64 million fewer jobs.