An Innovative Factory Runs Into Sustainability’s Scalability Problem

At Epic Group’s newly built factory in Bhubaneswar, a city in east India, the machines hum a little differently.

One of Asia’s largest apparel manufacturers, supplying Walmart, Levi’s and Uniqlo, among others, Epic designed the factory from the ground up to reduce emissions, conserve resources and protect workers from extreme heat.

Central to that aim is how the facility powers its garment dryers — one of the most energy-intensive steps in apparel manufacturing. Instead of a coal-fired boiler sending steam through a maze of pipes, an innovative high-temperature industrial heat pump pressurises water to as hot as 120 degrees Celsius to generate the heat needed for drying.

For an industry still struggling to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions ahead of 2030 targets, it offers a glimpse of what deep decarbonisation could look like.

Roughly half of fashion’s supply-chain emissions come from producing the heat required to wash, dye, dry and finish textiles. In South and Southeast Asia, home to much of fashion’s supply chain, most of that heat is still generated by burning fossil fuels.

This has made switching to electricity one of the industry’s most reliable pathways to decarbonise. In this endeavour, heat pumps, which use electricity to capture and amplify ambient or waste heat, have emerged as a leading candidate. While they’re best known for their use in residential and commercial buildings across Europe, they have become a key solution to electrify factories and slash emissions from fossil fuel-powered boilers.

But even Epic is careful not to frame the technology as a breakthrough that can be replicated everywhere.

“You cannot create a global solution,” said Vidhura Ralapanawe, Epic Group’s head of sustainability. “What we need is a global framework that enables very localised solutions, because the grid, the infrastructure, the economics, even the climate risks are different everywhere.”

That’s not to say the factory is a one-off novelty with no lessons for the broader industry. The efficiency of heat pumps is what makes them especially attractive, and why they’re seen as a potentially vital tool in fashion’s climate efforts.

“A heat pump gives you two to four units of heat for every unit of electricity,” explained Pauline Op de Beeck, climate portfolio director at the Apparel Impact Institute, which released a report evaluating the technology and other low-carbon, thermal-energy options earlier this year. “An electric boiler gives you one. That difference is why heat pumps matter.”

But unlike heating homes, the high temperatures needed for fashion’s multiple manufacturing processes at an industrial level is a much larger and costly undertaking. Epic’s new factory in India is the first built around heat pumps, making it the largest-scale example of the technology’s use in fashion’s supply chain.

“This factory is an innovation pilot for early adopters who can invest and push the technology forward,” Ralapanawe said.

Heat pumps similar to Epic’s could become a critical part of fashion’s climate future. But their effectiveness will be contingent on a number of factors, including — crucially — who is willing to pay for them.

Inside Epic’s Experiment

Epic Group’s India factory, largely financed by International Financial Corporation, an arm of the World Bank that invests in private companies in developing countries, demonstrates what is technically possible with heat-pump technology, as well as why such solutions remain rare.

Most industrial heat pumps in operation today produce heat from hot water at temperatures below 100°C — sufficient for some washing and dyeing processes, but not for garment dryers, which typically rely on steam at much higher temperatures to produce sufficient heat. These high-temperature heat pumps are expensive, complex and manufactured by only a handful of companies worldwide.

Epic worked with heat-pump supplier TriGen to develop a system capable of reaching around 135°C. It paired that with custom-designed dryers from another company, Tonello, optimised for lower-temperature drying to maximise insulation and heat efficiency.

The company also ensured that the factory runs entirely on clean energy to achieve net-zero emissions. The undertaking involved establishing an electrical system that accommodated electricity generated from offsite and rooftop solar, while the building also features heavy insulation and optimised airflow to keep heat contained, reducing ambient temperatures on the factory floor and alleviating workers’ heat stress.

But as ambitious as Epic’s factory is in its quest to showcase what’s feasible, it still has its limits. Ralapanawe said Epic was never under the illusion that its model would be perfect or easily replicated. He noted that in areas where electricity is still generated primarily from fossil fuels, like in parts of Bangladesh where Epic has most of its other factories, switching to heat pumps could even increase emissions in the short term. In some of its facilities in Bangladesh, Epic has installed low-temperature heat pumps to manage heat stress, but because of a less reliable grid, it cannot implement a project similar to the one in India.

Additionally, while heat pumps proliferated in Europe in part because of subsidies, stable electrical grids and policy incentives, in major garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia, those supports are often absent.

Even so, Epic’s new factory shows how fashion can start to address some of the thornier complexities in bringing down emissions in its supply chain.

“We wanted to solve the hardest part of the problem,” said Ralapanawe.

It’s an important piece in the larger puzzle of decarbonisation, even as Ralapanawe is quick to note that all those other pieces still count.

“The danger is that we chase one shiny technology and delay what could be done today,” he said. “Steam efficiency, heat recovery, better chemistry like low-temp and cold-washing, and equipment upgrades, those things don’t get headlines, but they matter.”

The Need for a Portfolio of Solutions

What’s clear is that many of fashion’s decarbonisation leaders see moving from fossil fuels to electrical power as the best path forward. Heat pumps are likely to be part of the mix, but success will not hinge on a single breakthrough technology.

Few apparel companies have invested as deeply in understanding decarbonisation technologies and their tradeoffs as Patagonia. Beginning in 2021, the outdoor brand, alongside other companies like New Balance, REI and the Outdoor Industry Alliance, funded what it describes as the first large-scale studies of electrifying thermal energy in textile mills across Japan, China and Taiwan.

Rather than betting on a single solution, Patagonia’s approach has been deliberately plural. Alongside heat pumps, the company explored electric boilers, process redesign and, most notably, electrified thermal energy storage, which captures heat generated with electricity during off-peak hours and releases it when needed, allowing factories to reach higher temperatures while reducing strain on local grids.

“We didn’t start by asking, ‘What technology do we want?’” said Kim Drenner, Patagonia’s head of environmental impact. “We started by asking how we electrify heat, and heat pumps aren’t the answer for every mill … I don’t believe in one technology saving us.”

At the Apparel Impact Institute, which funds and coordinates climate projects with brands and suppliers, heat pumps are similarly treated as one part of a broader electrification strategy. The organisation supports pilot projects using both high-temperature “steam” heat pumps and lower-cost hot-water systems, particularly in mills processing cellulosic fibers like cotton and viscose, which require less heat than synthetics.

The challenge stifling all these technologies is their capital cost: Implementation can take years and requires long-term commitment from both brands and suppliers. AII’s Op de Beeck said its pilots can have payback periods often exceeding five years — far longer than most factories can take on without financial support from brands.

Under pressure to phase out coal, many suppliers have also turned to biomass boilers as a stopgap solution, delaying and taking away investment from long term electrification.

Patagonia has attempted to overcome these hurdles by directly financing feasibility studies, sharing capital costs and using carbon-offtake agreements to help fund investments that suppliers could not otherwise make.

“Asking suppliers to take on tens of millions in capex without long-term commitments is an unjustified ask,” Drenner said. “If brands want electrification, they have to carry some of the risk.”

Op de Beeck said there currently isn’t enough investment flowing into supply chains to fund the solutions needed. Grants, low-interest loans and long-term brand commitments like Patagonia’s will be essential if electrification is to scale, she noted.

In the meantime, fashion’s progress on disclosing its emissions is stalling while the heat continues rising in the industry’s supply chain. For all its limitations, pilots like Epic’s factory are essential to proving that electrification can work under real-world conditions, as long as there are multiple targeted solutions at play.

“[Decarbonisation] is messy, local, and expensive,” said Ralapanawe. “That doesn’t mean there’s no space for adoption. It just means but we have to be realistic about what we can and can’t do.”

Want to dive deeper into an insight from this article? Check out The Brain of Fashion, BoF’s new generative AI tool where you can unlock BoF’s sustainability archive with a single question.