Bangladesh’s garment industry takes river pollution to threatening levels: Report

New Delhi, Aug 8 (IANS) Bangladesh’s garment industry, which generates nearly 80 per cent of the country’s export earnings, has left its rivers heavily polluted, a new report has claimed, citing the World bank data.

The report from Bangladesh-based The Daily Star said that over 7,000 factories in greater Dhaka discharge about 2.4 billion litres of untreated effluents daily into nearby water bodies.

Weak domestic law enforcement has allowed international buyers to benefit from low production costs of Bangladesh while environmental burdens fall on local communities.

“The people bearing these costs are the farmers who can no longer irrigate with river water, garment workers whose lungs have absorbed years of textile dust, and children in riverside slums whose developmental delays will never appear in a corporate ESG disclosure,” the report noted.

Despite 273 LEED‑certified green factories, progress remains limited as certifications as they “do not automatically guarantee that wet processing, dyeing, washing, and wastewater discharge are being managed across the entire production chain.”

The Lancet Commission’s Bangladesh brief estimated that pollution in air, water, and soil was responsible for 26.6 per cent of all deaths in Bangladesh.

Though multinational fashion brands publicly commit to sustainability goals such as “carbon neutrality”, “circular fashion”, or “net-zero supply chains,” their production sites being far away in impoverished countries enable them to hide environmental costs from corporate sustainability reports.

Enforcement challenges stem from limited staffing and resources at the Department of Environment, with penalties often too low to deter illegal activities. “If the cost of treating waste exceeds the expected penalty for illegal discharge, pollution becomes the economically rational decision,” the report said.

The publication urged the government to raise the fines on polluters substantially and publish the names of rule violators, and make the monitoring data available to the public.

“This issue is becoming increasingly urgent because environmental compliance is evolving from a domestic regulatory concern into a condition for maintaining access to international markets,” the report said.

–IANS

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