Bangladesh has 67 garments factories already that have the Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) certificates and around 220 garments factories are in the pipeline to get the LEED certificates soon. The information was revealed to The Independent by the founder of Denimsandjeans, Sandeep Agarwal. LEED provides green building certificates worldwide. This shows that keeping environmental sustainability in mind, Bangladesh is building more eco-friendly factories. Agarwal was speaking to The Independent at the seventh edition of ‘Denimsandjeans Bangladesh’, an exposition of jeans products, which concluded in Dhaka on Thursday. Asked about the importance of green factories, Agarwal replied that making the factories eco-friendly has become more important worldwide because the planet is turning out to be more vulnerable for its inhabitants by the day. Bangladesh earns around EUR 1.3 billion every year by exporting denim jeans and stands number one in the European market. This shows the massive opportunities that lie in building more green factories that will produce denim jeans in a sustainable, environment-friendly and productive manner, he added. A Spanish company, Jeanologia, which has participated in the Denimsandjeans expo, specialises in the development of sustainable technologies for garments. The company presented its new ‘e-flow technology’. This correspondent asked the project manager of Jeanologia, Fabien Liautard, about the working pattern of ‘e-flow technology’. He replied that the traditional method is to wash functional denim fabrics in water. E-flow technology uses air and has basically two different parts: laser and eco. “e-flow technology gets the air from the atmosphere and transforms it into nano-bubbles. These bubbles consume minimum proportions of water and functional elements that are not harmful for the environment,” Liautard said. The marketing officer of Jeanologia, Kazi Nahidul Alam, said that by using e-flow technology, an exact amount of chemicals are used on denim jeans and none of it is wasted. So, there is no chance of emitting excess chemicals that are harmful to the environment. He explained that the traditional method needs 1,800 litres of water to wash 100 kg of denim garments, while the e-flow method uses only 30 litres of water to wash 100 kg of denim jeans. He also added that e-flow technology saves 1,770 litres of water compared to the traditional method. It is entirely sustainable and environment-friendly for the product. Envoy Textiles Ltd is a renowned denim jeans manufacturer in Bangladesh. It has got the Platinum award from LEED. Envoy marketing manager Asif Wares Khan told this correspondent that Envoy uses a water treatment plant to wash the denim fabrics. “It is a modern technology. It recycles water and is not hazardous for the environment,” he said. Product sustainability is the prime concern for any manufacturing industry, especially readymade garments, because it emphasises environmental, social and economic benefits without harming the environment. It gets product benefits too. The event manager and cofounder of Denimsandjeans Bangladesh, Rubaiyat Ahsan, said that natural dyes derived from plants, invertebrates or minerals are being used to dye denim fabrics in Bangladesh for quite some time. “This discharges less emission and is not harmful for the environment at all,” Ahsan added. Rubaiyat also told The Independent that in the near future, the export market of denim jeans would exceed the market of the woven fabric because the price of woven products is not increasing as compared with denim fabrics or jeans. Garment factories like Ha-Meem Group, Shasha Denims Ltd, and Envoy Group produce top-quality denim jeans in Bangladesh and export these, said Ahsan. According to Denimsandjeans officials, Bangladesh is the second largest jeans exporter in the world after China. Currently, 29 renowned mills are producing denim jeans in Bangladesh. Around 28 companies from Bangladesh, Turkey, India, China, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Pakistan, Hong Kong, among others, participated in the expo to showcase their denims, fabrics and latest accessories.
