The International Finance Corporation (IFC) plans to launch the second phase of its advisory service—Partnership for Cleaner Textile (PaCT)—in Bangladesh with an aim to achieve sustainable textile production.The factories will need to invest 63 million dollars.

Under the program, garment and textile makers are advised to adopt modern technologies in factories and changing attitudes to reduce water and energy consumption in the next four years.

During the second phase, the World Bank arm targets to annually save 32 million cubic meters of water and 3.8 million megawatt hours of electricity in 250 weaving, spinning, wet dyeing and finishing factories.

It aims to annually reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 701,588 tons, wastewater discharge by 28.8 million cubic meters and chemical use by 10,000 tons.

Two hundred factories got back the 39.1 million dollars they invested in just ten months and in turn saved 16.3 million dollars every year, under the PaCT’s first phase adopted in 2014.

They also annually saved 21.6 million cubic meters of groundwater, which 8,40,000 Bangladeshis use on an average per year, and 2.5 million megawatt hours of electricity, which was 5.4 per cent of the national grid’s output in 2015-16.

The first phase's achievements surpassed targets by a huge margin.