Addressing climate change and plastic waste in Bangladesh’s garment industry through a global value chain perspective

A DANIDA funded project:

Abstract:
Global garment value chains are among the major contributors to climate change through their use of materials for fast fashion. Bangladesh as the second biggest garment export hub with limited enforced environmental regulation is among the largest contributors with greenhouse gas emissions. The global value chain literature which has been a dominant approach for understanding upgrading in the garment industry has a research gap regarding explaining how to conceptualize the post-production and related climate challenges including how to device solutions useful for the local suppliers and the local government in connection to overcoming this challenge. The gap reflects that GVC researchers only recently has started to conceptualize sustainability dynamics and still primarily been concerned with social sustainability on an aggregate level. Yet, as argued by Ponte and colleagues GVC research maintain lacking a clear ability to conceptualize GVS climate impact. This has resulted in a new set of GVC type of research questions and a new framework addressing tensions between the different goals.
The new framework provides the point of departure for this application; it has only been applied in the Kenyan context of horticulture. The framework takes a makes an analytical distinction between the processes of environmental/climate upgrading concerning value creation and appropriation and so-called resultant outcomes e.g., biophysical manifestations, market access . Moreover, the framework applies the upgrading from a multiple actor perspective instead of from a narrow buyer-supplier perspective and thus emphasize the societal embedding of the processes. Yet, the role of governance of global value chains and the impact of governance on post-production remains unstudied as does the implicit post-production local-global value chains dynamics.
To address this research gap, as a case we have selected Bangladeshi readymade garment (RMG) industry which is one of the world's leading manufacturers of clothing and textiles. Bangladeshi RMG can create huge market demand for recycled plastic and play an important role in bringing circularity in the plastic life cycle