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Bangladesh is yet to tap its potential for recycling textile waste (commonly known as 'jhut') which includes factory offcuts, scraps, and fluff, into yarn to be used for making readymade apparels. Currently the garments sector produces approximately 400,000 tonnes of 'jhut' per annum. A significant portion of this (about 60 per cent) is exported to various countries like India, Hong Kong and other countries as 'waste', earning approximately US$300 million.
But this material has a large demand from a RMG sub-sector. The sub-sector in the industry, terry towel manufacturers and their representative body, BTTLMEA (Bangladesh Terry Towel and Linen Manufacturers' Association) have for the last few years been pleading with the government to stop the export of this crucial raw material which is used to make towels and other products.
Again, if this jhut is not exported but used locally, BGMEA (Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters' Association) leaders believe that it will have a two-fold benefit for the sector. First, as stated earlier, the annual value of waste material exported stands at around US$300 million. If that material is not exported but recycled locally, then the yarn that could be produced would go on to manufacture about 1.0 billion pieces of garments. The export value of these 1.0 billion garments would be worth around US$3.0 billion. It is worth noting that some big RMG groups have already started their own plants to recycle waste material. This includes the Beximco group and there are some other smaller companies which have just started the recycling process. Unfortunately they only recycle about 5.0 per cent of the annual total waste material.
As with any nascent industry, there is need for policy support. The first step would be to ban the export of jhut and enforce that ban because a few years earlier, a nexus of traders were misrepresenting jhut material so that this precious commodity could be exported. That practice is still on and the country is losing on it. Currently, nations importing our jhut are recycling the waste material in their respective countries and selling the recycled yarn back to Bangladesh with a lot of value addition.
The second issue is environmental degradation leading to health issues due to dumping of micro-fibers (in the jhut) in open landfills or disposal through incineration. Incineration means on the one hand wastage of primary fuels which has to be paid by municipality, and on the other, causing air pollution. There is hardly any point in discarding jhut, which has a commercial value as a primary raw material to produce yarn. Why earn $300 million a year by exporting jhut when given the right policy support, jhut could be used to produce finished products with a potential value of $3.0 billion?
If the government recognised recycling of yarn from jhut as a sub-sector of the biggest export earning sector of the country and provided the incentives enjoyed by the RMG sector as a whole, Bangladesh could potentially become one of the top textile-recycling centres globally. Because Bangladesh is already in the club of top five countries in apparel manufacturing, setting the stage for recycling waste-to-yarn to feed the sector makes sense. Textile waste recycling factories would not only be serving the domestic industry, but over time lead to the economies of scale. Bangladeshi recyclers could compete to grab a piece of the global textile recycling pie and earn precious forex that the country so desperately needs.