Bangladesh’s textile industry accounts for nearly 79% of export earnings and employs 3.5 million people. Almost 30% of Bangladesh’s industrial sector GDP is fuelled by the USD 17.9 billion industry. The International Finance Corporation has been working on the PACT program, the main objective of which is to help SMEs in textile sector adopt cleaner production practices. Low level of awareness among SMEs and unavailability of local expertise is a big constraint in these projects.
IFC together with ASSIST, engaged in this activity to provide guidance to a few local consultancy firms shortlisted by IFC to deliver CP projects to SMEs in Dhaka and Chittagong, to help in building a local talent pool as well as make the services affordable for the local industry in the future. The overall goal of this assignment, through this activity, was to enhance the long-term competitiveness and sustainability of the textile wet processing sector in Bangladesh. The programme additionally focused on water as the primary driver for change but, also addressed energy and chemical use (water-energy chemical nexus) for an integrated approach to resource efficiency.
Local consultant capacity building; training on report writing and document preparation; conducting walk-through audits; formulating baseline assessments and debriefing on cleaner production for the top management were some of the activities implemented as a part of this project.
Industrialization has the potential to help achieve poverty eradication, improve gender equality and labour standards and provide greater access to education and healthcare. At the same time, industrial processes play a major role in the degradation of the global environment. Industries in developing countries have significant potential to reduce the material, energy, and pollution per unit of industrial output.
The project’s aim was to implement a sustainable industrial development programme through the promotion of resource efficiency and waste management practices benchmarked on international standards. The envisaged outcome of the project was to help the supply chain factories of footwear, apparel and accessories (FAA) sectors in the developing countries of Asia (Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and China) to reduce their energy, water, waste and CO2 emission by 25% by 2015, compared to the 2011 baseline, and to contribute to a green economy and sustainable industrial development.
Over the course of the project, more than 500 attendees were trained and 35 factories participated from the target countries. The project resulted in total savings of USD 4 million in the first year with an average payback period of 2.5 years, 62,000 MWh per annum of energy saved (equivalent to 44,500 tons per annum of carbon dioxide emissions), nearly 633,000 m3 per annum of water saved and approximately 660 tonnes per annum of waste reduced.
