ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has joined a nine-country initiative to reduce the environmental impact of the fashion and construction sectors. The six-year, $45 million programme aims to transform supply chains in these industries by promoting regenerative design, replacing non-renewable materials, enhancing resource-efficient production, encouraging responsible purchasing, and improving post-use collection practices. The initiative is part of the Global Environment Facility-funded “Integrated Programme on Eliminating Hazardous Chemicals from Supply Chains”, which seeks to reshape supply chains and drive sustainable practices in the target sectors.
The initiative also leverages an additional $295m from other sources to maximise the impact, the UNEP says. Fashion and construction are among the top three sectors contributing to pollution, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), land degradation, water pollution and biodiversity. The building and construction sector is the largest end-market for chemicals, and producing 1kg of textiles requires 0.
58kg of various chemicals on average. Both sectors connect producers, retailers, and consumers from across the world and are characterised by complex, fragmented, global supply chains with globally significant impacts. The integrated project is made up of nine projects in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and Trinidad in Tobago in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Cambodia, India, Mongolia and Pakistan in the Asia-Pacific region, and one global coordin.
