Sustainability happens in the supply chain, but that looks different in every country, depending on its cultural, ecological and geopolitical context. This article is part of our Made in India series, where we unpack the nuanced challenges and opportunities in Indian fashion supply chains. Read more here.
India’s fashion and textile industry is on the brink of rapid expansion.
Last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled plans to triple the country’s fashion sector to reach a value of $350 billion by 2030, powered by vast infrastructure expansion and foreign investment. His vision includes 2.1 million new jobs and seven industrial “mega-parks”, led by the Ministry of Textiles and dubbed the PM Mega Integrated Textile Region and Apparel (PM MITRA) scheme. It’s a bold aim, but not unexpected, given India’s domestic brand and retailer boom, coupled with rising export prospects following the US’s trade war with China.
Concurrently, fashion businesses around the world are facing increasing pressure to meet ambitious sustainability targets. Brands selling fashion in the European Union face stiff sustainability regulations and pressure to halve emissions before the end of the decade. Likewise, brand signatories of the United Nations Fashion Charter for Climate Change (UNFCCC) — which include Inditex, Primark, Adidas and Kering — mustn’t onboard suppliers with onsite coal boilers from 2025, and all existing coal boilers should be decommissioned by 2030; greenhouse gas emissions must be halved within the same time frame. Short of stopping production altogether, the only way to meet these targets is by reducing the amount of energy used and getting it from renewable, non-fossil sources.
It’s unclear how much global sustainability goals will influence India’s growth plans. For India’s textile sector, domestic sales are threefold the value of its exports — where it ranks fifth in the world — and its main export market is the US, which has seen wide-reaching attacks on climate action since President Donald Trump took office for the second time. But the stakes are also high for India. According to the World Economic Forum, India is the seventh most vulnerable country globally to climate change, and the climate crisis could cost India up to 10 per cent of its national income. It has its own sustainability goals to meet, too: namely, to reduce its emissions intensity by 45 per cent and to increase its share of non-fossil power capacity to reach 50 per cent by 2030.
All things considered, India’s textile growth plans offer a sustainability opportunity as much as an economic one, says Shivam Gusain, a decarbonisation associate at sustainability platform and investor Fashion For Good. In this view, India could “beat all other textile manufacturing hubs, except maybe China”, in the transition to low-emissions energy, thanks to “government incentives, lower political tensions and [relative] climate resilience [compared with some other vulnerable South Asian countries]”. The question is: what will it take to strike the right balance between growth and sustainability goals?
Decarbonising the energy mix
The sustainability implications of India’s expansion plans hinge on whether or not it can decarbonise energy supplies. Implementing low-carbon, renewable solutions is no easy (or quick) feat, with multiple factors at play.
India’s adoption rate of solar power is second only to China (the fastest, but also the biggest consumer) and its renewable energy capacity (mostly from solar, wind and hydroelectric dams) grew from just 4 per cent in 2016 to 22 per cent by 2022. In a bid to accelerate industrial sector progress, Indian State Governments have introduced incentives for factories to install rooftop solar, and, in some cases, establish solar parks and sell excess solar power back to the grid.
But India (like many other countries) remains mostly reliant on coal for its national grid electricity, primarily because it is abundant, cheap and extremely calorific (meaning it releases a lot of energy when burnt). Plus, India is categorised as a ‘developing country’ with its net-zero goal in 2070 (rather than 2050) and is contingent on international financing in keeping with a ‘just transition’. Asking Indian fashion suppliers to decarbonise quicker, as the fashion industry is, means asking them to significantly outpace their national energy transition.
While solar adoption continues apace, thermal energy (required by textile factories to produce hot water and steam) is derived from burning gas and coal. This combustion causes a major chunk of fashion’s total emissions, and there are no ‘fully ready’ solutions, unlike solar and wind for renewable electricity generation. In India’s factories, most thermal energy is generated onsite in coal boilers. By contrast, factories in Bangladesh and Vietnam have mostly gas boilers, which are less emissions intensive than coal ones.
Some Indian factories have begun transitioning from coal to biomass boilers, which could help reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, if executed properly. Biomass has sparked debate in the past, specifically where native wood has been used, stoking fears around deforestation. Biomass of unknown origin could pose a risk to suppliers, says Peter Ford, a garment sector decarbonisation consultant who formerly oversaw H&M Group’s energy efficiency work. And non-waste biomass sources such as plantation wood, as is popular in Cambodia, “will carry an emission factor similar to fossil gas due to land use changes”, he adds.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (for tracking progress towards climate goals) stipulates that biomass from agricultural waste is a carbon neutral fuel. Thankfully, India has this in abundance, mostly from food and cotton crops. India’s vast agricultural sector generates more than 500 million tonnes of biomass each year, with at least 140 million tonnes classified as surplus. Much of this excess is burnt in the open air, causing illness-inducing pollution. Instead, this waste could be converted into pellets and bricks and burnt in closed boilers, which capture pollutants. Biomass as fuel also offers a vital new revenue stream to Indian farmers.
“There are roughly 150,000 gigawatt (GW) hours available from this surplus and the average textile facility requires 75GW,” says Gusain. “More than a thousand factories could transition to biomass and put a major dent in coal [across India],” he adds. There are limitations, though: “We have abundant biomass, but not abundant systems to make [and store] biomass pellets.”
Due to India’s world-leading volume of cotton production (neck and neck with China) some manufacturers have set up biomass supply chains to collect local crop residues, like cotton husks. Textile and garment manufacturing group Arvind, in partnership with H&M, replaced coal with biomass boilers last year for an expected annual saving of 60,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Shahi Exports, one of India’s largest textile and apparel exporters, has also invested in biomass and aims to transition all its textile mill boilers by the end of this year. But such transitions come at a price. Gusain says it could cost a supplier between $1-2 million to transition to a biomass boiler, adding 3 to 15 cents more per yard of fabric — but in terms of emissions reduction per dollar spent, it’s a good deal.
However, Ford says biomass isn’t always the best option. “[New biomass boilers should only be considered] if all energy efficiency actions have been done, if 100 per cent genuine agri-waste such as rice husks, cotton stalks or nut shells are locally available, and if there is no potential to electrify steam.” Despite being carbon neutral, biomass should be seen primarily as a transition fuel, not the end goal, says Ford. The lifespan of a biomass boiler is 15 to 20 years, so those installed now would need to be replaced around 2040. For India, this coincides with the timeline for full decarbonisation of the national electricity grid, at which point electrified boilers, which Ford says are a better long-term solution, should be the replacement.
Driving efficiency and innovation
Switching energy sources is vital, but so is reducing the amount of energy needed. India’s main sector competition here is China, which is already “light years ahead” in terms of efficiency and innovation, Ford says, pointing to the improvements in dyeing processes and digital printing that are helping to reduce demand for steam. Furthermore, strong government oversight of factory decarbonisation in China — and increasingly in Vietnam — means that factories there are often already making significant energy efficiency gains, he adds.
India has several plans up its sleeve. Last month at Bharat Tex, India’s largest textile trade fair, Fashion For Good presented the Future Forward Factory concept, which aims to build a best-in-class Tier 2 (textile mill) facility in one of the seven textile mega-parks. The ‘prototype’ facility will demonstrate innovative low-impact textile processing solutions and deliver an open-source factory plan that is modular and replicable. Fashion For Good hopes the prototype will encourage existing and new textile mills to invest in the “correct” solutions to deliver optimal efficiency and minimal emissions, while maintaining economic viability. “It’s a blueprint for near-net-zero textile facilities with positive return on investment,” explains Fashion For Good innovation director Priyanka Khanna. “We expect it to be built in 2026.”
One international manufacturer is already carving out its factories of the future, in Eastern India’s Odisha PM MITRA mega-park. Epic Group, which owns factories in Ethiopia, Jordan, Bangladesh and Vietnam, is investing $100 million in four new apparel manufacturing facilities producing mostly cotton clothing for US and European brands, for 100 per cent export. Its first two factories are currently under construction.
The venture, called Trimetro Garments, will leverage three provisions to ensure its operations are carbon neutral, says Dr Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive VP of sustainability and innovation at Epic Group. It will host 5 megawatts (MW) of rooftop solar, coupled with an offsite solar plant of 3MW using open-access methodology to get renewable electricity from the grid. The thermal energy requirement will be met with a biomass boiler, which will use briquettes made with agricultural waste, manufactured locally.
The open-access approach allows Bangalore-based garment manufacturer Trimetro Garments to invest in a solar park and thereby secure extra renewable electricity capacity, supplementing its own rooftop solar and ensuring all of its electricity is carbon neutral. For thermal energy, it’s more complicated.
“There are two ways to decarbonise our thermal energy needs for steam — one is electrification, the other is biomass. We chose biomass because certain garment finishing processes require high-pressure steam, and moving this to electrification isn’t currently possible. The technology is nascent,” explains Ralapanawe. The chosen energy solutions depend on the facility’s demands. Trimetro Garments’s operations will span garment cutting, sewing and washing — not dyeing or denim processing, which demand significantly more thermal energy.
Each facility’s thermal energy infrastructure will depend on the types of production it carries out, with textile and garment dyeing at high temperatures being the most energy intensive processes of all. In this context, a factory that only cuts and sews fabrics to make garments (Tier 1) needs only electrical energy, and can, technically, decarbonise today (through rooftop solar, for example). But Trimetro’s thermal energy needs mean there’s more work to be done.
“We are trialling alternative solutions [to biomass], including heat pumps, in the first factories,” says Ralapanawe. Industrial heat pumps are units that capture ‘waste heat’ that escapes from factory processes, repurposing it to reduce the need to burn more fuel. “Depending on the performance [of the heat pumps] we will then understand whether it is possible to remove the need for biomass boilers entirely in the third and fourth factories,” he concludes.
With the green shoots of government-backed growth and efficiency drives, India is becoming a “centre for momentum”, says Khanna. “The key players putting energy into [the sustainability] transition are here.”
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