Producing green products and reducing waste by reusing and upcycling industrial waste discarded by the large, export-oriented, ready-make garments industries in and around Dhaka City, Bangladesh.

Many export-oriented, ready-make garments industries in Bangladesh hardly bother to upcycle, recycle, or reuse the huge waste they left behind. Often this waste is also used as fuel for traditional cooking stoves, making huge amount of toxic smoke, or incinerated, which causes health hazard. Sometimes it is even used to do earth-filling without sorting out the synthetic items from it, causing further problems in eco-system damage. The said project is the newest local innovation done by and for the needs of local, poor people. No external expert or resources were invested to find this solution. No big company conducted research and development to coin this sort of product. Small firms in this cluster successfully penetrated into competitive export markets, progressed technically by moving up the value chain, and acquired new technologies and innovation in both products and process. The project is particularly interesting since issues like climate change, reducing carbon, and increasing resource efficiency are high concern in the international stage. It plays a critical role in creating green jobs and employing unskilled and semi-skilled people in the production process.

The ‘Saidpur Model’ shows that a developing country like Bangladesh is capable of bringing not only the transition from productive capacity to innovation capabilities, but it also proves the viability of using local technology to achieve the low cost innovations. This is a unique example of how a local innovation can be fostered and valued alongside the wider development of high technology, which is commonly associated with globalization. This local innovation is being tried and tested by community members, making it more likely to be taken up and valued. This case shows how adapting simple technologies can provide alternative means of income generation in era of globalization.

SME Foundation started to promote this project, labelling it as ‘Saidpur Model’. Initially no financial institution agreed to give them loans as they were in no position as formal business entity – they don’t have even trade licenses, and they have no capacity to provide collateral support. On the other hand, they were also not qualified to get loans from NGOs. SME Foundation had to coin an exclusive financial product at a low interest rate and without collateral to support this cluster. The cluster then expanded the business rapidly, and started getting support of different government machineries.

* The Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) Foundation * Young Entrepreneurs Associations of SMEs (YEAS)