Bangladesh’s Ready-Made Garments (RMG) industry remains the backbone of its industrial growth in the coming decades. This paper sought to examine its environmental compliance landscape in terms of the incentives and barriers RMG entrepreneurs face. The paper in particular looked at the high achievers in greening, which includes some of the factories who have the most eco-friendly RMG factories, as certified by the US Green Building Council (USGBC); and some of the factories that partnered with the International Finance Corporation’s Partnership for Cleaner Textiles (PACT) project, which is the world’s largest initiative for resource efficient apparel manufacturing (Daily Star 2017 a). This approach was taken to demonstrate three things: is cost recovery possible in the medium to long term for investments that go beyond mandatory government and basic buyer requirements; what kind of barriers did the high achievers face and what lessons are there for other RMG companies who may benefit from greening; and what kind of policy and institutional changes are needed to spread greening from the high achievers to the rest of the industry. The key points of the paper are given below.
