Pakistan‘s premier readymade garment industry group, with over 500 member companies, has joined a climate initiative led by fellow manufacturers who seek to lower the environmental impact of their business through scalable and practical decarbonization.
The Pakistan Readymade Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (PRGMEA) has officially joined the Apparel & Textile Transformation Initiative (ATTI), making it the third country to do so after Bangladesh and Turkey.
ATTI said in a recent statement that it signed a memorandum of understanding with PRGMEA to establish a national chapter under ATTI as manufacturers look to accelerate practical and scalable decarbonization efforts across the global sector.
Under the agreement, ATTI said it will support PRGMEA across the full scope of work, including a needs assessment, a collaborative solutions design, and a contextualized plan to develop Pakistan’s garment and textile sector. PRGMEA, for its part, committed to provide the institutional resources, staff capacity, and member engagement required for effective implementation.
“As one of the world’s most significant garment manufacturing and exporting nations, Pakistan’s inclusion strengthens ATTI’s mission to reduce fragmentation, coordinate efforts, and accelerate the sector’s transition to lower-impact production,” ATTI said in its statement.
ATTI is a relatively young program, having only been launched in June last year during the London Climate Action Week by the International Apparel Federation and the Apparel and Textile Transformation Initiative. According to its official website, similar garment manufacturer and exporter groups in Bangladesh and Turkey—countries which are among the world’s top exporters of textiles and apparel—have signed up for the program.
During its launch last year, ATTI was deliberately described as a manufacturer-led program, giving these stakeholders a voice in a discussion that often finds them without one. As Miran Ali, a former vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, explained it, brands would often make sweeping pronouncements, only to pass the bill to their manufacturers and their workers.
“You cannot turn up in a country which is the second-largest exporter of apparel in the world, and then demand radical changes without ever expecting to spend even one penny on it; it’s not possible,” he said during the launch. “Yes, we need to make this industry more sustainable. It has to be more transformative. But you can’t destroy my country to make your clothes.”
What these efforts look like in real life remain to be seen, but the plan acknowledges the huge role the textile industry is playing in the Pakistani economy, as well as the immense carbon footprint it leaves at its wake.
Textiles are the largest export product in Pakistan, with the industry responsible for roughly 40 percent of its total labor force, according to the country’s Board of Investment. Globally, Pakistan ranked the 9th largest exporter of textiles in 2024, after shipping out $19.5 billion worth of material, data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity showed.
As for many industrial countries, progress, even one that can create a lot of jobs, has its costs. In Pakistan, the local textile sector is the second largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions after the cement industry, with different sources estimating it to account for 5 to nearly 9 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, or approximately 8.1 million tons of carbon ever year.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/