Fashion has a coal problem, but the solutions are electrifying

Garment factories burning coal is bad, and must stop. The fashion industry has largely aligned on this fact by now, with most high street brands (absent Patagonia, PVH, C&A and some others) having signed the UNFCCC’s Fashion Charter commitment to no onsite burning of coal at factories supplying T1 (final assembly and packing) and T2 (fabric, washing, dying and various other processes) by 2030.

A handful of brands – H&M Group, Ralph Lauren, Decathlon and Adidas – are working to remove coal in 2025. A few others are prioritizing action at the T1 level where coal demand is smallest, where alternatives to produce the heat for ironing and other small processes are already available, and where brands have the most oversight and leverage.

But how this replacement of coal is happening across the industry is not subject to any real alignment or oversight. Replacing coal with lower carbon alternatives has been ongoing for a few years now – for example, H&M Group communicated with all T1 and T2 supplying factories in late 2021 – but now global brands slowly start to react to the public commitments they have made, sometimes aided by vocal scrutiny from groups such as Stand.Earth (and their campaign against Lululemon’s coal usage), and Fashion Revolution’s annual reporting. Thankfully, very few brands of note are walking back on their commitments.

Corn husks from local farms that replace coal in a garment factory’s boilers in Pakistan. Image courtesy of Peter Ford.

In some of the countries where clothing is made, biomass sources are a long existing, viable and low-impact coal replacement – the husks of rice left over from processing, stalks of sugarcane, corn cobs etc, are all deemed as agricultural waste and suitable for burning at factories. An ideological argument can be made that collecting and burning this properly, with suitable air filtering, boiler maintenance and emissions monitoring is a less damaging action than the annual burning seasons across South and Southeast Asia where post-harvest fields are ignited, blanketing whole countries in choking smoke for months.

But even if this agricultural waste is indeed better used by factories, this only accounts for a small proportion of the biomass the industry is already using – and at increasingly high rates – as 2030 decarbonization deadlines approach.

While southern Vietnam generates enough rice husk waste that it can export the stuff, the north of the country consumes “wood chips” of sometimes unknown origin. Turkey and eastern Europe also utilize such chips. In Indonesia, palm kernel shells (PKS) are king, monetizing this waste from the palm oil industry that is decimating the remaining natural forests. Imported Indonesian and Malaysian PKS is the main biomass used in Taiwan’s garment industry, which lacks any domestic biomass source of its own, and has shown up in factories as far away as Portugal. And in Cambodia, “plantation wood” is the coverall term to describe the mixture of offcuts from various rubber, acacia, cashew plantations, often mixed with wood taken directly from the shrinking national parks.

Efforts to limit biomass to just agricultural waste have not received widespread industry support – for brands that have the capacity and willingness to focus on the topic, then the ISC’s guidelines (supported by H&M Group, Gap, VF Corp, Ralph Lauren and Adidas) is a useful tool – but none of the various industry collaborations or bodies or gatherings have taken leadership on the biomass topic. Nor, seemingly, does anyone want to, despite being made loudly aware of the risks. While forestry has sustainability certification bodies like Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), nothing exists for the myriad agricultural sources. Can palm oil waste ever be sustainable at the volumes that exist today? And who will police the fuels in countries like Cambodia, where the wood burned by factories comes with official certifications and years of inaction.

Garment industry buildings with solar panels and farms alongside, eastern China. Image courtesy of Peter Ford.

Coal replacement isn’t just limited to a shift to biomass: in Turkey, Pakistan and mainland China fossil gas is the most popular replacement, due mostly to the price of gas compared with grid electricity or biomass. Such short-term thinking by brands, based primarily on fuel costs and the extremely price sensitive nature of the industry, continue to signal they won’t pay extra for goods, creating a new friction point as factories invest in gas infrastructure that will need to be replaced before brands’ net zero commitments come due in 2040/2050.

All of this ignores the longer-term need to not burn anything anymore to make the hot water needed to dye, wash, print and pre-shrink the clothing the world consumes.

For the T1 units, where it is mostly needed to iron clothing prior to packing for transport and sale, there is no technical reason why that heat cannot come from electricity in almost all processes. Whether this electricity can be reliably and transparently sourced from 100% renewable sources is a secondary challenge that is increasingly improving in almost all garment producing countries, with Bangladesh the notable exception. Who could have predicted that the same countries, primarily selected by brands for their affordable work forces and simple labor laws, would later have governments unwilling to loosen their grip on cash-generating, centrally-owned electricity grids – solar panels (PV) on factory roofs means a loss in direct government revenue – or without the infrastructure funds to rapidly modernize and expand their grids to meet demand?

T2 units have long faced the simple economic challenge of decarbonization, that coal is plentiful and cheap. Now that brands are telling factories that coal must go – and the alternative fuels cost more and require different storage, or more frequent delivery and larger storage, or time of year availability etc. – they are scrambling to adapt to meet the timelines dictated by the brands.

Nor does a shift from burning coal at the factory to using electricity from a coal-heavy national grid bring any immediate carbon reductions unless the factory has sizable onsite solar PV, which is unlikely for most T2 sized units due to 24 hour factory operation and high energy demand – they are lucky enough to have corporate Power Purchase Agreements (cPPAs) available, currently in three mainland Chinese provinces, Vietnam, Taiwan, India and Turkey – or if they are buying energy attribute certificates (EACs, instruments used to track renewable energy consumption), often at significant cost, and which are not universally agreed as actually supporting decarbonization.

Entire villages in parts of Cambodia have turned to illegal logging of natural forests to supply the firewood needed by garment factories churning out products for international fashion brands. Image by Andy Ball/Mongabay.

Which is to say, removing fossil fuel energy from garment factories isn’t a simple case of just removing the coal. The biomass alternative – often the cheapest and easiest switch to make from a technical perspective – leads to new environmental challenges, which are only growing as energy demand increases, changes in land use, and the warming planet changes growing seasons, increases flooding, and makes fires more destructive.

Until very recently, the like-for-like replacement of burning coal with burning something else, especially at the T2 level, felt like an impossible task. To supply the amount of steam needed by existing processes was prohibitively expensive due to the price of electric boilers, the cost of electricity, and the ability to source renewable electricity. However, in the past two years great strides have been made in both reducing the steam and hot water needed for dyeing – known as “waterless dyeing” – while Rondo Energy and others continue to scale up thermal heat storage solutions that can utilize cheap, off peak electricity to finally electrify processes formally only possible by burning fuels.

Indeed, the mantra of “electrify everything” is finally gaining traction in the garment industry after feeling like an impossible dream. Notwithstanding any decarbonization gains that will come from efforts to promote degrowth and fabric recycling, it is the electrification – and using renewable electricity – that will drive near term positive impact.

If brands are willing to support the short-term increases in energy prices faced by their suppliers, then it’s also an increasingly practical replacement for coal, fossil gas and most sources of biomass – for the sake of what remains of the world’s natural forests, I hope this happens quickly, and that other energy-heavy industries can make similar positive changes.

Check Data Hub™ for the sustainability performance of the companies mentioned in this article: H&M, Ralph Lauren (73 ktCO₂), Decathlon (216 ktCO₂), Adidas (164 ktCO₂)...

This article is also published on Mongabay. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.