How to Build a Garment Factory for an Overheating World

The hardest part of building India’s first fully net-zero carbon and water manufacturing plant was proving whether the model could work at all.

“There’s no technical manual on how to build net-zero facilities,” said Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group, a Hong Kong-headquartered garment manufacturer with facilities in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Vietnam. “There are a lot of technical gaps that exist in decarbonization.”

Dealing with extreme heat in India, where oppressive temperatures have become a matter of routine in recent years, revealed another disconnect. Air conditioning systems in the South Asian nation typically top out at 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Recent highs have easily blown past 47 degrees Celsius, rendering existing guidelines obsolete even as emissions from human activity continue to drive global temperatures higher.

“Our industry lacks the technological understanding of what makes a proper heat strategy for different factories,” Ralapanawe said. “If we don’t fix that, any money we invest will either be wasted or fail to deliver the results we want.”

It was no small feat, then, that Epic Group inaugurated the Trimetro Manufacturing Campus in Khordha, Odisha, at the end of April. Backed by a $100 million sustainability-linked loan from the International Finance Corporation—plus an undisclosed long-term sourcing commitment from a prominent high-street brand—the sprawling 40-acre site combines onsite and offsite solar power, water conservation and recycling systems, highly insulated and strategically oriented structures and biodiverse green features to create what Ralapanawe touts as a “benchmark” for building garment factories in a climate-constrained world.

“I think we have probably the most energy-efficient cooling system in the industry,” he said. “But we also designed the buildings to stay naturally cool so they require less air conditioning. My boss walked inside the warehouse and said, ‘Vidhura, this is cool without any cooling.’ I said, ‘Yes, because it’s a super-insulated shell.’ The traditional building shell that we are used to building is simply not meeting requirements.”

The factory is also built to withstand more frequent and severe rainfall—another hallmark of climate breakdown—through higher elevation, specially constructed drains and a large-capacity quarry-turned-pond that can channel vast quantities of stormwater.

For Ralapanawe, the moral case for protecting worker well-being was clear: Intense heat has been linked to muscle cramps, fatigue, lightheadedness, urinary tract infections, menstrual disruptions and, in some cases, death. But the expense also made financial sense, since productivity losses from flooding, as well as increased water breaks and medical visits during prolonged hot spells, would ultimately cost more.

“My point is we cannot afford to follow the same old-fashioned factory model going forward,” he said. “I have three principles for any factory we build. First, are you net-zero carbon—or close to net-zero? Second, the factory must be as close to net-zero water as possible. Third, it must have the ability to withstand future climate extremes, whether that means extreme rainfall, cyclonic activity, river floods or intense heat waves.”

But the Trimetro Manufacturing Campus, purpose-built for both emissions reductions and climate mitigation, is an outlier in the garment industry.

In a recent Social & Labor Convergence Program assessment of 10,000 facilities across more than 54 countries, 69 percent report having no plan to address climate change. While 80 percent of SLCP facilities monitor regulated indoor temperatures, 16 percent operate at 31 degrees Celsius or higher, close to or above recognized safe heat thresholds for workers. In India, 64 percent of the country’s 600 facilities lack climate plans—a similar share. Among those that maintain indoor temperatures, however, conditions are more severe: 37 percent operate at 31 degrees Celsius or higher.

At the same time, facilities appear to lack clarity on available heat stress management options, let alone what climate adaptation entails—potentially affecting data quality and interpretation, said Janet Mensink, CEO of SLCP.

“It’s great we have some evidence now based on a large pool of facility data that this is another big topic in terms of human rights due diligence risks,” she said. “We’ve only scratched the surface and will add more detailed questions in Converged Assessment Framework 2.0 on this.”

An occupational hazard

It’s against this backdrop that Epic Group’s Indian factory sends an “incredibly powerful message,” said Lucy Siers, senior associate research scholar on global labor at New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and author of a recent report on extreme heat in India’s garment supply chain.

“This is a supplier that recognized the threat of heat and constructed its new facility around that as a starting point,” said Siers, who visited the Trimetro Manufacturing Campus while it was under construction—along with nine other factories in Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra—in December. She also noted that an unnamed buyer pushed Epic Group to increase its ambition, effectively acknowledging extreme heat as a threat to business resilience and forging a level of collaboration that has largely been missing.

“Heat is no longer an external climate issue,” Siers said. “It’s an occupational health and safety risk, and it should be identified by brands as one that is increasingly becoming a supply chain resilience issue.”

Not everything has to be a heavy lift. Workers she interviewed said basic measures like access to cool water, toilet breaks, rest breaks and adequately spaced fans made a meaningful difference.

Yet many brands continue to treat the publication of a code of conduct or an OSH policy as the “limit of their responsibility,” she said, pushing the burden of safeguarding workers onto suppliers without sharing costs or adjusting the purchasing practices that hinder factories’ ability to invest in cooling or infrastructure upgrades. Though most of the suppliers she visited last year identified heat as an issue, many of the improvements they have made have been reactionary rather than part of a “systematic approach” to extreme temperatures. Even those efforts to sustain production have rarely gone far enough, Siers added.

“When I asked these factory managers what else they needed or what would incentivize them to go a step further, quite a few said it comes down to the brands,” she said. “As long as they can maintain production, they won’t take additional action unless brands explicitly ask for it. They were quite upfront in saying that any investments they’ve made, they’ve maxed out on. What is now required is some form of external incentive.”

A survey of 46 of the world’s largest fashion brands—17 of which responded—that Siers helped conduct suggests that ignorance isn’t the problem: 94 percent of respondents recognize extreme heat as a moderate or significant risk. Even so, only 35 percent ask their suppliers to measure temperature and humidity inside production areas, and among those, 64 percent do so only sporadically.

“Brands claim to know that heat is a risk to production, but they’re completely flying blind,” she said. “They recognize the threat, but they lack the basic information needed to manage it. If heat were treated like any other occupational health and safety issue, there would be routine measurement and monitoring. They would build this contingency of extreme heat into order planning and capacity assumptions.”

The cost of decarbonization

Ralapanawe agrees there needs to be “space in the commercial relationship” for brands and suppliers to engage on the issue, whatever form that may take given the multiple variables involved, including location, energy costs and climate projections, especially with periodic El Niño-driven spikes. Many cooling solutions, for example, rely on a stable grid—something not all countries have, with Bangladesh being a notable example. In such contexts, large-scale air conditioning would place a massive strain on existing infrastructure. Another critical need is a capital pool.

“Bangladesh increased electricity costs by 18 percent,” he said. “We have to absorb that increase because no brand is coming and saying, ‘I’m going to give you a little bit more because your electricity costs went up.’ When we don’t actively talk about a shared risk model for implementation, it essentially becomes a tool to pass responsibility onto us.”

Epic Group, through Ralapanawe, is also a member of the Fashion Producer Collective, which launched the Bang for Buck tool in April to help manufacturers identify the most cost-effective energy-saving upgrades. Even with the right frameworks in place, however, putting these strategies into practice isn’t easy.

“First, this approach is very new to the industry,” he said. “Air conditioning isn’t something we typically manage during the design phase because it’s usually left to highly specialized consultants. In contrast, upgrading compressor or steam systems is bread-and-butter work; large manufacturers are far more comfortable with those standard interventions. This leads to the second problem: we simply don’t know if the industry has enough technical knowledge to implement these solutions.”

When designing the Trimetro Manufacturing Campus, which is set to include five factories and one washing plant, some elements were aspirational while others were “just sensible thinking,” Ralapanawe said. Epic Group has pledged to halve its greenhouse gas emissions and freshwater consumption from a 2019 baseline by 2030, but decarbonization in Bangladesh is limited by the lack of direct power purchase agreements and access to alternative fuels. Efficiency, he said, can only go so far, particularly for a company looking to grow.

“There was always this intention of doing something more innovative in India at the back of our minds,” Ralapanawe said. “We had a good consultant join us, and together we were able to put forward a strong vision document. Many companies would look at that expansive vision and say, ‘Tell me you’re nuts.’ But everyone approached it with the understanding that we needed to set a standard, not just in India, but for the industry.”

India is also generally hotter than Bangladesh, which made cooling an imperative. What made the project truly viable, however, was the anonymous buyer having “skin in the game.”

“Because there is a long-term commitment to volume that came before we set up the factory,” Ralapanawe said. “Now the collective visioning process has a lot of power, because it sits on top of a longer-term commitment to fill the factory.”

But the real test now is drawing up an equivalent blueprint for Bangladesh, where Epic Group still remains deeply entrenched.

“We are setting up a new washing plant in Bangladesh,” he said. “The challenge is that it’s a constrained space, it’s multi-story, and it’s not like here. So how do we bring those same principles into this space? It’s not easy, but it has to be done.”