Md. Tahmid Zami

The world's second biggest exporter of clothes, Bangladesh is looking to technology to gain control of the fashion industry's other major product: textile waste.

Cloud-hosted software allows manufacturers to segregate, label and register waste on a digital platform and track it as it passes between factories, handlers and recyclers.

The fashion industry has seen its carbon emissions rise despite pledges to halve pollution by 2030 - now efforts are underway to invest millions of dollars in ambitious energy efficiency projects that will clean up dirty production lines.

The Apparel Impact Institute (AII) is a U.S.-based non-profit that works with fashion retailers, philanthropic organisations and manufacturers to promote investments in cleaner production.

The world's demand for fast fashion has allowed greenhouse-gas emissions to rise despite ambitions to decarbonise supply chains by 45% by 2030.
More than 600 fashion companies have adopted science-based targets for emissions reduction, compared with just over a dozen in 2019.

Yet the sector's emissions grew by 7.5% in 2023 from the year before, said a report last month by the Apparel Impact Institute (AII).

In the wake of student uprisings that toppled Sheikh Hasina's Bangladesh government last July, an interim government vowed to bring reform to the country's energy sector that is responsible for three-quarters of its planet-heating emissions.

The government led by Muhammad Yunus inherited energy subsidies for consumers which make up more than 1% of the country's economy and large outstanding payments for power imports as well, according to government figures.

Across Bangladesh, clay-fired kilns for brick making send filth into the air, spew toxic gasses and use up topsoil that could be producing food.

To clean the air and meet environmental goals, the government has been closing the polluting kilns, but the adoption of cleaner alternatives is badly lagging, industry insiders say.

The uprising in Bangladesh that ousted the former government one year ago was led by young people demanding greater economic opportunity.

An interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has formed nearly a dozen commissions to propose reforms for everything from the constitution to elections and has announced programmes to train and employ youth.

A year after an uprising forced the Sheikh Hasina regime in Bangladesh out of power, challenges persist in the country to address the severe lack of jobs among youth who took their grievances to the streets.

The uprising, in which some 1,400 people were killed, according to the United Nations, was sparked by the issue of quota reservations in the country's civil service recruitment tests.

It's back-breaking work - dusty, dangerous and poorly paid - but the million Bangladeshis who make, bake and stack clay bricks fear their jobs will soon go in the name of saving the planet.

And they don't expect that any 'green' change forced upon them will be easy to weather, fearing they will be sent back to their far-flung fields to eke out a thin living.

Across Asia, unions and industry groups are raising alarms over the impact of higher tariffs by the United States on garment workers.

High tariffs might force companies to shut down or move to neighbouring countries that offer lower tariff rates, resulting in a loss of jobs, they say.

The fashion industry is responsible for up to 8% of the world's planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, according to U.N. figures, which many of its companies have promised to tackle with targets to reach net zero by 2050 or sooner.

Yet researchers, companies and industry insiders say that little has been done to push this along in their supply chains in major textile-producing countries like Bangladesh, India and Cambodia.