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Waste Concern: Fixing Market Failures

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Managing Sustainable Business

Abstract

In 1995 Iftekhar Enayetullah and Abu Hasnat Md. Maqsood Sinha founded Waste Concern to research and develop solutions to the problem of waste in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Over the years they established a number of companies and grew nationally and internationally. They also pioneered two Clean Development Mechanism projects under the United Nations program. In this case we describe the financial problems faced by the entrepreneurs as the carbon market plummeted affecting their Clean Development Mechanism projects. We also report other unforeseen issues such as the electricity crisis and the problem with accessing the site needed for implementing the projects. The case illustrates how Enayetullah and Sinha deal with these problems. Their approach can be summarized by their own words “when there is a problem, there is also an opportunity”. The case also illustrates the number of challenges and questions that ensued.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Each unit is an equivalent to one tonne of CO2.

  2. 2.

    All data in this section (except where otherwise noted) come from the Central Intelligence Agency (2013), The World Factbook: Bangladesh. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook. Accessed 18 June 2013.

  3. 3.

    All quotations in Italics come from our conversations with Enayetullah and Sinha.

References

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Correspondence to Joanna Radeke .

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Radeke, J., Mair, J., Seelos, C. (2019). Waste Concern: Fixing Market Failures. In: Lenssen, G.G., Smith, N.C. (eds) Managing Sustainable Business. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1144-7_26

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