Air temperature vs energy efficiency of workspaces: A field investigation in garment factories during cool-dry season

Ready-made garments (RMG) with renowned brands are mostly produced in clothing factories in developing countries where workers labour around 10-12 hours a day to produce quality products in their workspaces. Their health, safety and wellbeing should be an important ethical concern of the customer. Their production efficiency has a major impact on the commercial benefits of factory owners and international buyers. Previous studies indicated that the thermal environment of their workspace (cutting, sewing and finishing sections) had a direct impact on their physical comfort and hence their production efficiency. In context of Bangladesh, most of the multi-storied garment factories are deficient in ventilating overheated indoor air and meeting workers’ thermal comfort. Owners of the factories use ceiling and large extract fans to resolve the issue which consume significant amounts of energy from the national grid. However, no extensive field investigation has been previously conducted to improve the existing workspace environment of the RMG factories considering passive ventilation as a way of ensuring workers’ thermal comfort and efficiency of energy. This paper presents the preliminary observations of the first field investigation of an on-going doctorate research. Three different case study buildings in the tropical climatic context of Bangladesh were chosen for on-site monitoring during the cool-dry season (one of the three climatic seasons). The field study involved continuous data-logging, on-site spot measurements, calculation of energy consumption and workers feedback surveys to understand the existing performance of the workspace. The thermal performance of the workspace was determined in terms of Dry-bulb Temperature (DBT), Relative Humidity (RH), and air temperature distribution within production floors in the weekdays and weekend. This paper focused only on partial findings from the field data and tried to reveal some potential strategies to improve the present thermal condition and to make the workspace more energy efficient.