Guest contributor: Kritika Chauhan, Shahi Exports
A factory manager in a South Asian garment plant has run that facility for years. He knows where the energy leaks, which machines are due for an upgrade, and roughly what it would take to fix them. What he’s never had is a way to prove it: a clear impact, a clear return, and a clear comparison against more similar options, all in a format a brand or a bank would actually accept. That’s not a capability gap. It’s a tooling gap, and until now, no one had built the tool from the supplier’s side of the table.
For years, sustainability tools in the apparel industry have flowed in one direction: from brands, consultancies, and standards bodies, down to manufacturers. Suppliers were expected to receive, comply, and report. The word decarbonisation often arrived less as an invitation than an instruction: here is your target, here is your timeline, now find a way.
Bang for Buck is a collaborative project facilitated by the Fashion Producer Collective and commissioned and led by Elevate Textiles, Epic Group and Shahi Exports, with support from GIZ FABRIC and technical partner Grant Thornton Bharat. The idea was simple, and quietly radical:
What if the tool were shaped by the suppliers themselves, not for them?
Bang for Buck helps apparel manufacturers identify which climate investments offer the strongest return for their specific facilities, covering 22 decarbonization technology measures selected with direct input from suppliers themselves, on the basis that they are practical, proven, and applicable across a range of factory setups, not just best-case facilities with ideal infrastructure. It gives sustainability managers a way to calculate ROI against emissions impact, and just as importantly, the language to justify those decisions to leadership and brand partners alike. It also lets facilities compare solution providers within the same technology category, so a factory isn’t only deciding whether to invest, but how to build confidence in that investment.
The process of co-designing
The process mattered as much as the product. Suppliers (we) weren’t respondents, wheeled in to react to a plan someone else had already made. We were co-designers from the first page.
We started by drawing the list of decarbonization technologies spanning energy production efficiency, chosen not because they were novel but because they’d already proven themselves on real factory floors. What followed felt almost constitutional. Every assumption was named and agreed on out loud. Every feature of the tool was defined before a single line of it was built. Nothing was quietly handed off to be “figured out later” by whoever was left holding it. Most of our real debates weren’t about whether a technology cut emissions; we already knew that. They were harder questions: Would this data actually exist inside a manufacturing company? Who would be responsible for owning it? And would the output be something a plant manager could actually put in front of a CFO and win the argument?
The paper itself was written the same way; jointly, end to end, with suppliers as authors, not reviewers signing off on someone else’s draft.
And it’s free. Not as an afterthought bolted on at the end, but as a founding principle: access should never be the barrier standing between good research and the people who need it.
What surprised us along the way
Some technical factors, such as grid emission factors, fuel availability, and local infrastructure, do vary across geographies and shape which decarbonisation pathway makes sense for a given factory. Yet despite these differences, what remains constant is how similar the underlying challenges faced by suppliers are, regardless of where they are based. Whether a factory is in South Asia, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere, the core pressures stay remarkably consistent: difficulty accessing upfront capital for green upgrades, uncertainty about which technologies will actually deliver, and the persistent challenge of communicating ROI to buyers who want sustainability commitments but rarely want to share the financial burden. The specifics of the problem, and in some cases the solution, may vary, but the underlying shape of the challenge does not.
What also stood out was that the tool was never about identifying the most innovative or cutting-edge projects. It was about identifying the most practical and supportive ones, the interventions that work within real constraints, that can be financed, operated, and defended in a board meeting or a buyer call.
Personal reflection
Being part of this process, as both a supplier and a co-creator, was genuinely refreshing, and the shift in dynamic is, in some ways, the real output of Bang for Buck. Suppliers in this industry are used to adapting to frameworks built elsewhere and then explaining to their own leadership why those frameworks matter; here, that direction reversed, and every design choice had to survive contact with our own scepticism before it made it into the tool. Watching that dynamic flip, even partially, even in one project, left an impression, and it points to something worth carrying forward: that this kind of collaboration is possible, and repeatable, may end up mattering just as much as the tool itself.
Visit Bang for Buck to explore the tool. Download the Introduction to discover how industry stakeholders can collaborate on decarbonization.
Would you like to support the expansion of the Bang for Buck framework into additional geographies and technologies?
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This supplier-side perspective is important. Manufacturers are often expected to implement improvements without enough discussion about operational feasibility, investment recovery and measurable commercial value. Sustainability becomes much stronger when factories are treated as partners in developing the solution, rather than only as the implementation end of a brand requirement.