Bangladesh Sees Opportunity to be ‘Leader in Circularity’

With circularity becoming a bigger concern in fashion, industry stakeholders question who’s responsible for the cradle-to-cradle transition and how the shift will be financed and monetized.

At the first Bangladesh Circular Economy Summit held last week at the Radisson Blu Water Garden hotel in Dhaka, stakeholders from Bangladesh as well as global brands and government representatives agreed that circularity requires cooperation.

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The event organized by the Bangladesh Apparel Exchange (BAE) in collaboration with Laudes Foundation, an Amsterdam-based nonprofit focused on climate solutions and economic inclusion, and in partnership with global multistakeholder platform P4G, outlined some immediate steps the garment-producing sector should follow.

Bangladesh’s status as the world’s second-largest apparel producer after China with exports of approximately $40 billion means the Southeast Asian nation must quickly address the waste it creates.

“We have a lot of vision, but vision can only be translated into action with the proper support of the government,” BAE founder and CEO, Mostafiz Uddin said when introducing the event, adding that Bangladesh produces more than 400,000 metric tons of waste a year.  “There are various ways to help. First, is policy support, and to help out private organizations; we are not allowed to bring post-consumer waste duty free in Bangladesh, we need help in that area. We also need help with financing. Recycling and the technology for it is very costly, it is also a longer lifecycle so we need policy support on financing.”

Acting to promote change is a “shared responsibility,” he said.

“The government won’t do everything for us,” Uddin said. “We all have a shared responsibility: the brands, manufacturers. We could be the first country to be the leader in circularity.”

Former Bangladesh Garment Manufacturer and Exporters Association (BGMEA) president and Dhaka North city mayor Atiqul Islam showed support for recycling and circularity initiatives in his speech. A large number of apparel manufacturing factories are clustered in and around the Bangladeshi capital.

Saber Hossain Chowdhury, member of parliament and special envoy to the prime minister of Bangladesh (Environment & Climate Change), left the ball in the private sector’s court. “Let the industry be very specific in terms of the policy support and the fiscal support needed. We want to incentivize circularity and recycling. It is an existing challenge today, not something that will happen in the future,” he said, noting that the government was keen to back it up.

“This is something we see around the world, the private sector is ahead of the game, and governments are trying to play catch up,” Chowdhury said.

Support for Bangladesh is coming from global powers, too.

“We want to partner up with Bangladesh,” said Bernd Spanier, deputy head of the European Union (EU) delegation to Bangladesh. “But there are two important things we would like to see as EU—first, a free circulation of waste and recycling technologies—without open trade on these issues we are undermining it so any restriction or any ban on waste would be counter conducive to our goal. Second, the circular economy has to be fueled by renewable energy. If it is run on by dirty fuel, it contradicts our purpose.”

The EU is establishing a chamber of commerce in Dhaka to “help Bangladesh with knowledge and technology transfer,” Spanier added.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed the need to “decouple economic growth from resource dependency to the extent possible, which is one of the many areas where the circular economy comes in,” Spanier said.

Noting that Bangladesh had continued to show growth even during covid, Edimon Ginting, country director, Asian Development Bank (ADB), said that it was time to defy the patterns followed by other countries. “At ADB we study the progress of many of the countries in the region. They grow first, clean up later. That’s an expensive process,” he said. “A number of countries ahead of Bangladesh have done that. Now it is no longer the case, to grow first and clean up later. The technology is there to make it happen at the same time.

“We have to look at a different way of growing, decoupling growth from pollution,” Ginting continued. “Dhaka is building a waste-to-energy plan. With technology, waste can be an asset.”

Not everyone agreed that future technology breakthroughs are the answer. “Most technology for mechanical and chemical recycling is already there,” said Kim Poldner, professor of Circular Business at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. “We just have to use it.”

Swedish retailer the H&M Group is working on putting some of this into practice, with Bangladesh as one of its biggest sourcing hubs.

Group CEO Helena Helmersson met with prime minister Sheikh Hasina earlier this month for discussions on advancing circularity and promoting the growth of renewable energy and other transformations for the garment sector.

Leyla Ertur, head of sustainability for the Cos and Monki owner, noted that the group already works closely with manufacturers on sustainability and recycling.

“Bangladesh is not only our biggest production market, but also the H&M Group is one of the biggest customers for the Bangladesh textile industry. The change here makes an impact on our way of working,” she said.

“Bangladesh is unique as the country with the world’s largest share of pre-consumer textile waste readily available for recycling. It has a great potential to attract investments from local and foreign investors to scale up the production of high-value recycled fibers from pre-consumer waste. However, we are well-aware the industry needs advancing policy to regulate the waste handling sector in order to move forward in this area,” she said, adding that the H&M Group aims for 30 percent of materials coming from recycled materials by 2025, and 100 percent materials should be either recycled or from sustainable sources.

Before the second circular economy summit arrives on June 12, 2024, “the next 12 months will [bring] a series of workshops, hackathons, design, innovation, training and policy dialogues,” Uddin said.

The sector will soon shift its attention to the inaugural fashion-focused Bangladesh climate conference on Oct. 12, at the same venue in Dhaka.

The event will address technological and financial challenges around reducing emissions. Announcing the event, BAE noted that most of the world’s leading fashion brands have now set ambitious targets for reducing supply chain emissions, aiming to halve emissions by 2030 before achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

“Bangladesh is the perfect stage for the Climate Action Forum. As well as being a major producer of garments, it is also itself a victim of the increasingly unstable global climate and has witnessed a marked increase in weather extremes in the past decade,” Uddin said.

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