Khan said.

"Every day I am receiving emails or phone calls from buyers from different countries," he said, including Britain, Australia, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and France.

The bag is likely to have "huge demand around the world," said Sabuj Hossain, director of Dhaka-based export firm Eco Bangla Jute Limited.

He said his company hopes eventually to export 10 million of the bags each month.

Commercial production is expected to start near the end of the year, said Rashid of the BJMC.

Khan said that if all the jute produced in Bangladesh went to make the sacks, the country was still likely to be able to meet just a third of expected demand.

While Bangladesh's own plastic bag ban is now almost two decades old, million of the bags are still usedeach year in the South Asian country because of a lack of available alternatives and limited enforcement, officials said.

About 410 million polythene bags are used in the capital Dhaka each month, the government estimates, and in some waterways such as the Buriganga River a three-metre-deep layer of discarded bags has built up.

The new bags should help ease the problem, said Quazi Sarwar Imtiaz Hashmi, a former deputy director general of the Department of Environment.

"As jute polymer bags are totally biodegradable and decomposable, it will help check pollution," he said. (Reporting by Rafiqul Islam ; editing by Laurie Goering : (Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)

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