Epic Group has inaugurated the Trimetro Manufacturing Campus in Khordha, Odisha — a 40-acre site the Hong Kong-headquartered manufacturer describes as India's first fully net-zero carbon and water garment plant. The project, launched at the end of April, is backed by a $100 million sustainability-linked loan from the International Finance Corporation and an undisclosed long-term sourcing commitment from a prominent high-street brand.

The campus, set to include five factories and one washing plant, combines onsite and offsite solar power, water conservation and recycling systems, highly insulated building shells and stormwater management built for more severe rainfall: higher elevation, purpose-built drains and a large-capacity quarry converted into a retention pond.

Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group, said the financing structure proved decisive. "Because there is a long-term commitment to volume that came before we set up the factory, now the collective visioning process has a lot of power, because it sits on top of a longer-term commitment to fill the factory," he said.

Heat shaped the engineering brief. Indian air conditioning systems typically top out at 40 degrees Celsius, while recent highs have exceeded 47 degrees. Epic designed the buildings to stay naturally cool, reducing the air-conditioning load. "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," Ralapanawe said. "The traditional building shell that we are used to building is simply not meeting requirements."

He framed the investment as commercially necessary rather than philanthropic. Productivity losses from flooding, plus increased water breaks and medical visits during prolonged hot spells, would ultimately cost more. "We cannot afford to follow the same old-fashioned factory model going forward," he said, setting three principles for any new Epic factory: near net-zero carbon, near net-zero water, and resilience to future climate extremes including cyclones, river floods and heat waves.

Sector lags far behind

The plant remains an outlier. A Social & Labor Convergence Program assessment of 10,000 facilities across more than 54 countries found 69 percent have no plan to address climate change. While 80 percent of assessed facilities monitor regulated indoor temperatures, 16 percent operate at 31 degrees Celsius or higher — near or above recognized safe heat thresholds. In India, 64 percent of the country's 600 SLCP-assessed facilities lack climate plans; among those monitoring indoor temperatures, 37 percent run at 31 degrees or higher.

SLCP CEO Janet Mensink said the data confirms heat as a human rights due diligence risk. "We've only scratched the surface and will add more detailed questions in Converged Assessment Framework 2.0 on this," she said.

Lucy Siers, senior associate research scholar at NYU's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, visited the Odisha site during construction and noted an unnamed buyer pushed Epic to raise its ambition — a level of brand-supplier collaboration she said 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."

Her survey of 46 of the world's largest fashion brands — 17 responded — found 94 percent recognize extreme heat as a moderate or significant risk, yet only 35 percent ask suppliers to measure temperature and humidity in production areas, and 64 percent of those do so only sporadically. "Brands claim to know that heat is a risk to production, but they're completely flying blind," she said.

Cost-sharing remains the fault line

Factory managers Siers interviewed said they have maxed out their own investments and will not go further without explicit brand demands or external incentives. Ralapanawe pointed to Bangladesh's recent 18 percent electricity price increase as a cost suppliers absorb alone. "When we don't actively talk about a shared risk model for implementation, it essentially becomes a tool to pass responsibility onto us," he said.

Epic has pledged to halve greenhouse gas emissions and freshwater consumption from a 2019 baseline by 2030. Bangladesh decarbonization remains constrained by the absence of direct power purchase agreements and limited access to alternative fuels, making the Odisha model hard to replicate. The next test is a new multi-story washing plant in Bangladesh, where Ralapanawe said applying the same principles in a constrained space is "not easy, but it has to be done."

For sourcing teams, the message is direct: net-zero-capable capacity now exists in India, but it was financed on the back of a committed volume order — and equivalent upgrades across existing Asian supplier bases will not happen without brands sharing cost and risk.