DHAKA – The world’s leading fashion brands are in a frantic race to reduce their carbon emissions in order to meet climate targets. However, most are wrestling with the unfortunate conundrum that it will be impossible to reach their goals while pursuing a business-as-usual model. Unless, that is, they can somehow decouple growth from emissions.
It has been apparent for some time that the only way to achieve will be to shift supply chains entirely to renewable energy, given that upwards of 90 per cent of GHG emissions occur at this stage of the value chain.
The process of greening supply chains has been stop-start, the pace of development generally held back by a lack of capital. However, there are some notable exceptions to this, one of the most encouraging of which is Green Textile Ltd Unit-4, a joint venture between textile giants Epic Group and Envoy Legacy of Bangladesh.
The plant in the Bhaluka upazila of Mymensingh (around 75km north of the capital Dhaka) recently scored 104 out of 110, the highest-ever grade in the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.
Green Textile Ltd Unit-4 is part of Green Textile Limited, a manufacturing hub which was established in 2014 and which, with the addition of Green Textile Ltd Unit-4 now consists of four production units.
The facility manufactures woven tops. Output is 4 is 6 million garments per year while the full Green Textiles Limited hub produces 20 million garments per year.
There is much talk of how much it costs to green supply chains and, perhaps most pertinently, who picks up the bill. To this end, Green Textiles Limited offers an interesting case study.
Across the whole GTL hub, north of US$50m has so far been invested. This has included state of the art building and construction design along with other investments in the most sophisticated equipment and processes designed to save water and energy.
Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president of the Epic Group, told us the company is looking for a return on investment at Green Textile Ltd Unit-4 of six to seven years. The scale of this investment and the medium term payback would perhaps make it prohibitive to smaller players in the market and we do wonder whether supply chains will become more and more consolidated within larger players like this as demand for garments from greener factories intensifies.
Asked for some details of energy and water savings, Ralapanawe told us: “For LEED buildings we compare this against a LEED baseline factory. For energy, we have 40 per cent savings from a baseline facility. Water savings are about 51 per cent. Energy savings is 43 per cent and CO2 savings is 748 metric tons per year.”
Could this factory be replicated across the Epic Group? Ralapanawe told us it is replicable in part. “When it comes to design, we start with a base template from which we optimise each new factory based on the unique characteristics of location, product and process,” he said. “Our ventilation and lighting designs are optimised using modelling/simulations. We are continuously in the lookout for new technologies we can add to the facility and improve our designs. We continue to evolve the facilities at each iteration.”
A major challenge in supply chains is that many facilities were developed before heightened concerns around climate issues become mainstreamed, although Bangladesh has been quite progressive in this area. It boasts many of the most highly rated LEED factories in the world, although the ‘payback’ for this investment in terms of better prices for apparel has not materialised as some might have hoped.
We asked Ralapanawe about the development of green factories generally and how easy it is to retro-fit existing factories to make environmental savings. He told us: “It is far more easier to set-it up from scratch as we begin the design with keeping KPIs and specific parameters in mind. While some retrofits are possible, existing facilities have design constraints that cannot be fully overcome. Having said that, since many of our facilities are designed as green facilities we have advantages when we focus on sustainability KPIs.
“In terms of retrofits, while it is possible to get good savings from energy, water and GHGs, a green buildings incorporate much more elements related to site, open space, greenery, indoor occupant comfort, materials and air quality. Not all these can be retrofitted.”
What about the use of renewable energy generally? Is it technically possible to power a factory like this entirely from solar energy? Answering, Ralapanawe said: “In a single storey cut and sew factory in Bangladesh, like Green Textiles Ltd Unit 4, we can go up to 60 per cent of electricity from solar power. This is because Bangladesh has relatively lower solar irradiation*. Our new factory in Jordan is designed to produce 100 per cent of its electricity consumption from rooftop solar panels planned for the plant.”
*Solar irradiance is a measure of the suns intensity or power density over a certain area, commonly defined as being an average intensity
