Sustainable textile production in Bangladesh

From the 3rd to 17th October 2018 7 academic staff from Universities based in Dhaka Bangladesh (Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology and Notre Dame University Bangladesh) arrived in Dresden to participate in a 10-day workshop organised by the Chair of Sustainability Management and Environmental Accounting and PRISMA – The Centre for Sustainability Assessment and Policy. The workshop was held as part of a DAAD-funded project, “Introducing sustainability to the textile engineering curriculum in Bangladesh”,which aims to introduce the theme of sustainability into the curriculum of University-level textile courses in Bangladesh, as a way of fostering mobility for teaching staff in Bangladesh to collaborate with German academic partners and gain knowledge of sustainability concepts which can be applied into course components (in the form of module components and entirely new courses) which aim to influence the knowledge, understanding and capabilities regarding sustainability management in future managers in the Bangladesh textile industry.

As part of the workshop, the project partners from Bangladesh were offered insights into the sustainability teaching offered at the Chair of Sustainability Management and Environmental Accounting, drawing on topics from general introduction to sustainability principles and resource management, practical tools for measuring, monitoring and assessing sustainability (drawing on techniques from the Chair’s teaching portfolio), through to more theoretical approaches to sustainability such as corporate social responsibility and strategic management. Here, the Bangladesh partners were not only given the opportunity to participate in these lectures and practical sessions to test their own understanding of the content, but were also asked to contribute by drawing links from the lecture content with their own teaching course offerings. Feedback from this exercise saw synergies between the Chair’s teaching on resource efficiency and sustainability management controlling with the Industrial Management course offered by AUST and there is a desire to integrate components into the syllabus here. Practical tools such as Lifecycle Assessment and Material Flow Cost Accounting were also indicated as useful tools which could be adapted to fit the Wet Processing and Production Planning and Control modules at AUST by drawing on specific examples relating to textile engineering. For NDUB, the aim is to develop new courses, building on the existing expertise in topics such as Strategic Management but by putting further emphasis on sustainability management and social responsibility.

To further strengthen North-South co-operation, an expert plenum drawing on research expertise from European Universities was arranged to showcase the research being carried out in textile value chains. This brought together researchers focused on issues such as modern slavery, gender equality, trust and legitimacy in supply chain networks and responsible business practices. This event brought together eight invited experts with our Bangladesh project partners to develop networks with European researchers and gain an overview of contemporary research carried out in European Higher Education institutes. The events run were a great success, developing a spirit of cooperation and motivation to continue to work collaboratively to tackle global issues of sustainability challenges in global textile production networks. Whilst there are inevitably a number of challenges with international academic collaborations relating to distance, work environments, academic cultures, this event, and the subsequent planned events throughout the remaining project duration has the potential to bridge the gap between the perspective of textile industry sustainability as one of quality management and productive efficiency, with the theoretical perspectives of sustainability more common in German and wider Westernised settings.