This story in the original appeared in Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In 2023, fast-fashion giant Shein is everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, planes carry tiny packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. The influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos advertised the company’s trendy styles on social media, garnering billions of views.
At each step, data were created, collected, and analyzed. To manage all this information, the fast fashion industry has begun to embrace emerging AI technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine-learning applications — essentially, pattern-identification algorithms — to gauge customer preferences in real time and predict demand, which gives it a super-fast supply chain.
As AI makes the business of making affordable, on-trend clothing faster than ever, Shein is among the brands under increasing pressure to be more sustainable as well. The company has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
But climate advocates and researchers say the company’s lightning-fast manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently emissions-heavy — and the use of AI software to catalyze these operations may increase its emissions. Those concerns were heightened by Shein’s third annual sustainability report, released late last month, which showed the company nearly doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.
“AI is enabling fast fashion to become the fast fashion industry, Shein and Temu are leading the way,” said Sage Lenier, the executive director of Sustainable and Just Future, a climate nonprofit. “They really couldn’t exist without AI.” (Temu is a fast-rising ecommerce titan, with a merchandise marketplace that rivals Shein’s in variety, price, and sales.)
In the 12 years since Shein was founded, it has become known for its extraordinarily prolific manufacturing, which is reported to have generated over $30 billion in revenue for the company by 2023. Although estimates vary, a new Shein designs can 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 as many as 600,000 items for sale at any given time with an average price tag of around $10. (Shein declined to confirm or deny these reported numbers.) A market analysis found that 44 percent of Gen Zers in the United States buy at least one item from Shein each month.
That scale translates into massive environmental impacts. According to the company’s sustainability report, Shein released 16.7 million total metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2023 — more than four coal power plants emit in a year. The company has also come under fire for textile waste, high levels of microplastic pollution, and exploitative labor practices. According to the report, polyester – a synthetic fabric known for pouring microplastics into the environment – makes up 76 percent of its total fabric, and only 6 percent of that polyester is recycled.
