Assessment of safety, health and environmental risk factors in garments industries of Bangladesh

The Ready-Made Garment (RMG) sector, the highest earning foreign currency segment, has had a great influence on GDP (gross domestic product) since 1980. With new technology adaption as well as cheap labor force, this sector has placed the second position of exporting after China. To capture the market position, the management has to give more attention on maintaining Safety, Health, and Environment (SHE) guideline properly. This paper proposes a structured framework for occupational risk assessment by means of quantitative way and also provided remedies of those risks in garments industry in the context of Bangladesh. Here, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is applied for measuring the severity of safety, healthy, and environmental risk factors and QFD to prioritize the possible solutions. Through the literature review and extracting opinions from experts, a total of four evaluation criteria and sixteen risk factors under SHE categories are recognized and examined via AHP approach to measure their importance. The results demonstrate that ‘Fire’ ‘Contagious diseases’, and ‘Noise’ take high priority in safety, health, and environment related risk factors. The findings of this paper may help the garment industry effectively through the proper identification of the most influential risk factors and generating solutions to mitigate this issue.