Green factory

5th August 2010

Today we visited; Dogiefa - a swimwear fabric manufacturer, Texprint - a digital printing facility partly owned by a Spanish company but these were totally overshadowed by MAS Thurulie, which is the famous green factory making underwear for M&S (and others.) The ethos of this entire factory is based on sustainability. The surrounds are lush green palms and native trees, there are ponds and the whole facility was built on stilts so that it interferes less with the environment. They cool the building with a water curtain cooling system (which I can't explain because I don't really understand), they have used reflective materials to reflect the heat, they have planted a lot of the roof with grass, they use solar power and hydro-electricity, they harvest rain water for a lot of their needs and of course all of their machinery is as efficient as possible. They built the plant from scratch so they have not had to retrofit anything, they are a very wealthy company and have only been able to do these things because of this. This is definately a display of best practice as opposed to an easy fix for other existing factories.

We had a presentation later on in the day describing the aims of the whole park which is owned by MAS. They are doing lots of things to better the environment including educating school kids about bio-diversity.

That evening there was a party going on at the restaurant, a whole group of Nike factory managers from around the world had got in beer and whisky and KARAOKE - brilliant! Beth and I did a charming rendition of Love lifts us up, totally tunefull...