Md. Tahmid Zami

With open land scarce in Bangladesh, the textile industry is playing a part in the nation's clean energy transition by using roof space for solar power.

Under pressure from global brands to go green, textile suppliers, which account for 85% of Bangladesh's exports, are hoping new initiatives can help find the funds they need to expand rooftop solar power systems.

South Asia has seen a rapid expansion in rooftop solar power generation in the last two years as the region tries to cut its reliance on polluting and often-imported fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

The most spectacular growth has happened in Pakistan, where rooftop solar power now accounts for a quarter of the country's electricity supply, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a U.S. think tank.

Other South Asian countries lag far behind.

Internet-connected smart devices and artificial intelligence are speeding up production in the garment-making factories of Bangladesh, the world's second largest fashion-producing country.

On the shop floor of 4a Yarn Dyeing, popular music blared from a sound system as women sewed clothes at machines equipped with sensors that track how many pieces each worker produced in real time.

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.