This story originally appeared in Grinding and is part of the Climate table collaboration.
By 2023, fast fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Planes flew small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from one end of the world to the other, thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencer “#sheinhaul” videos promoted the company’s fashion styles on social media, generating Billions of views.
At every step, data was created, collected, and analyzed. To manage all this information, the fast fashion industry has begun to adopt emerging artificial intelligence technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine learning applications (essentially, pattern-identifying algorithms) to measure customer preferences in real time and predict demand, which it then serves with an ultra-fast supply chain.
As AI makes the business of producing affordable and fashionable clothing faster than ever, Shein is among the brands increasing pressure The company has also made a commitment to become more sustainable. The company has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2030 and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
But climate advocates and researchers say the company’s ultra-fast manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently high in emissions, and that its use of artificial intelligence software to catalyze these operations could be increasing its emissions. Those concerns were amplified by Shein’s announcement. Third annual sustainability reportpublished late last month, which showed the company nearly doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.
“AI is enabling fast fashion to become an ultra-fast fashion industry, and Shein and Temu are the leaders of this trend,” said Sage Lenier, executive director of Sustainable and Just Future, a climate-focused nonprofit. “They literally couldn’t exist without AI.” (Temu is a rapidly growing e-commerce giant, with a product marketplace that rivals Shein’s in Variety, price and sales.)
In the 12 years since its founding, Shein has become known for its exceptionally prolific output, reportedly generating more than 30 billion dollars revenue for the company in 2023. Although estimates vary, a new Shein design may take as little as 10 days to become a garment, and up to 10,000 items are added to the site each day. The company reportedly offers up to 600,000 items on sale at any given time with an average price of about $10. (Shein declined to confirm or deny these reported numbers.) A market analysis found that 44 percent of Gen Z in the United States buys at least An article from Shein every month.
That scale translates into massive environmental impacts. According to the company’s sustainability report, Shein emitted 16.7 million total metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023 — more than four coal-fired power plants emitted. vomit in a yearThe company has also been criticized for textile wastehigh levels of microplastic pollutionand exploitative labor practices. According to the report, polyester, a synthetic fabric known to release microplastics into the environment, makes up 76 percent of its total fabrics, and only 6 percent of that polyester is recycled.