Leading with impact
Epic Group’s executive vice-president of innovation and sustainability, Vidhura Ralapanawe, decodes how its newest ‘green’ micro-factory in Bangladesh leveraged its immediate surroundings to achieve the world’s highest LEED score in its category.
It might be said that Hong Kong-headquartered manufacturer Epic Group, founded as a textile trading house in 1983, has put itself on the map for all the right reasons. The company, which produces its apparel at facilities in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, made quite a splash back in February when it announced it had obtained the highest Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for a newly built factory anywhere in the world. The site in question scored 104 points out of a possible 110, taking it well beyond the threshold for the highest LEED level, Platinum, which requires a minimum score of 80 points. With sourcing offices in Vietnam, sales teams spread across Dubai, New York and Hong Kong, plus design studios in the latter two cities, Epic’s vantage point is certainly wide-ranging. Once its latest Bangladeshi facility, EGMCL7, is complete and its new site in Jordan begins operations during the second quarter, establishing a sales-meets-design presence in London is next on the agenda. The group presently employs 30,000-plus individuals worldwide.
At the centre of Epic’s latest LEED achievement is a campus-style Green Textiles Hub erected on 17 acres of land in Nijhury Baraid Bazar at Bhaluka in Mymensingh, around 70 kilometres from Dhaka. First set in motion in 2014, the hub’s entire built area today amounts to roughly 53,000 square-metres, with plans already in place to further develop the plot “in the near future,” Dr Ralapanawe tells Inside Denim. Right now, though, the site comprises four Green Textiles Ltd (GTL) factory units, including 48 sewing and finishing lines, as well as an on-site laundry and employee training and development locus Epic University. Total GTL capacity is in the vicinity of 20 million garments per year for tops and bottoms alone, in addition to 8.7 million garments for washing. Garment dyeing is a particular specialism.
Globally, jeanswear production represents approximately 30% of all apparel made by Epic, Dr Ralapanawe shares. The company opts to buy in denim fabrics from China, India and Bangladesh for the large part, he continues, which ensures a measure of uninterrupted access to “high-quality materials at competitive prices”.
Healthy outlook
Initially developed by the US Green Building Council, a non-profit, in the 1990s, the internationally recognised LEED rating system variously focuses on criteria such as carbon, energy, water and waste efficiency, the sustainability of materials and indoor environmental quality. GTL-4, the ground-breaking Epic unit that achieved 104 LEED points, notably attained full marks for site sustainability and water efficiency, according to the group. The factory, a joint concern with Envoy Legacy, also only dropped a single point when it came to energy and emissions management. Significantly, about 60% of the facility’s electricity supply is drawn from a 733-kilowatt rooftop solar energy system, while collected rainwater serves as a key source of water. Although special attention was paid to the purchasing and use of construction material, Dr Ralapanawe says it was the unit’s more rural location that helped things along immensely.
The building’s orientation was a major focus, for instance, as the team knew this could be leveraged to reduce its heating load. Larger windows were installed on the northern side, to allow for extra natural light penetration during the day. “We did not plan on achieving the highest LEED score,” the senior executive explains, but rather “the best factory from an operational and resource efficiency point of view and the best indoor conditions for our staff.” Planning began in late 2020 and work commenced in early 2021. Time inbetween was dedicated to design optimisation cycles – with modelling and simulations to improve lighting and ventilation, for example – which suggested that the unit could go on to earn a high number of LEED points. This led Epic to investigate how far it could “push the [building] envelope” in that regard, informed by past successes such as the nearby GTL-3 factory, another LEED Platinum project. Its efforts have already been celebrated by the government in Bangladesh, keen to incentivise the apparel industry to decentralise away from high-density urban areas, out to the country’s regions and rural areas.
Opened late last year, annual capacity at GTL-4 is six million garments and the factory is expected to reach full capacity in July. It is home to more than 1,300 workers, over 75% of whom are female. Associates are required to attend 30 days’ training at Epic University at the lower level, whereas supervisors must pass 75 days’ training on every machine.
Described as a “micro-factory of the future”, GTL-4 was built to facilitate shorter lead-times, smaller sewing modules and low work-in-progress by applying waste- and resource-reducing Lean thinking to its manufacturing methods. It features automated fabric spreading and sewing machines and cloud-based needle dispensing trollies and boasts real-time tracking of processes throughout with a system based on RFID smart tags, which harness radio frequency to identify, monitor and communicate with both people and objects. The facility is also outfitted with mould prevention equipment and its final packing areas are precision humidity controlled.
Importantly, each new unit builds on insights gained from the last, Dr Ralapanawe tells us, and the company makes “a very focused effort” to explore what can be done better each time. Across the board, machinery and automation decisions, steam systems, lighting and ventilation, architecture and engineering plans and landscaping and water use are all revisited frequently. Epic’s Green Textiles Hub is especially well-organised and more spacious, with ample open space, he says, adding that the surrounding “lush greenery” makes the group particularly conscious of how it should proceed with its operations and new building projects.
A deeper blue
Addressing denim-making colleagues specifically, the executive vice-president acknowledges that LEED’s energy efficiency criteria can prove complicated for denim fabric mills and laundries, especially if there is a reliance on fossil-based steam generation. “That makes meeting the energy prerequisites and higher scores in the energy section difficult,” Dr Ralapanawe states. But this is also where thinking about challenges beyond LEED certification, which focuses solely on the building itself, comes in. Epic’s own sustainability strategy looks at overall operations, with an eye to the difficult task of transitioning from an “outdated” global industrial model towards more regenerative and circularity minded practices, all the while endeavouring to rapidly shrink its water and carbon footprints. “This is easy to say, but extremely difficult to execute within a business context that is not already set up that way,” he underlines, framing the industry’s next steps as “a collective journey that spans and touches all partners in the value chain”.
Particularly meaningful strides the group has made in the sustainable denim realm so far include last summer’s agreement with US-based CleanKore, the developer of a patented yarn-dyeing technology that can generate energy savings of up to 60% during dyeing, plus water savings of up to 44% at the garment finishing stages, according to the partners’ own tests. CleanKore’s method retains the authentic white core of yarns and eliminates the need for potassium permanganate. Dr Ralapanawe notes that the deal has involved significant investment on Epic’s part, primarily due to the scale of the undertaking, as the technology’s price proposition was fortunately not found to be prohibitive. Progress has already been made to increase the volume of CleanKore-treated denims from four million garments initially to 15 million by year two. The goal is to scale up to 20 million pairs of jeans by 2025.
There has been a great deal of enthusiasm from customers about CleanKore so far, Dr Ralapanawe observes, and Epic expects more brands to sign up “as we refine our skills and offerings with the technology”. Aware that “real benefit comes with impact reduction at scale”, the apparel manufacturer is confident it can roll the technology out across the majority of its denim production, so long as customers are on board. Elsewhere, the group continues to build up its volumes of recycled polyester and sustainable manmade cellulosic fibres. It already believes “all” of its cotton to come from more sustainable sources and has been involved with the Better Cotton programme since 2019. Epic does source some organic cotton, but has not been able to scale this to the level it would like just yet, Dr Ralapanawe says. Integrating recycled cotton fibres into its denim blends is another top priority at present.
The industry is still feeling around the contours of what a contemporary denim mill or laundry should look like, and Dr Ralapanawe believes it is crucial to consider how these facilities would function and consume resources within a regenerative context, as well as to ask how a denim factory should define the role it plays in the wider ecosystem today. “Once we figure that out, then LEED certification would not be all that more difficult.”
According to Dr Ralapanawe, it can be difficult to obtain higher-level LEED scores for a factory’s interior environment on the subcontinent, due to material availability, so well-thought-out design is imperative to workers’ well-being.
All photos: Epic Group
