This story originally appeared in Milling and is part of Climate Office cooperation.
In 2023, speedy fashion giant Shein was everywhere. As it crisscrossed the globe, planes carried tiny packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers into tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencer videos with the slogan “#sheinhaul” advertised the company’s trendy styles on social media, bringing billion views.
At every turn, data was being created, collected, and analyzed. To manage all this information, the speedy fashion industry began to adopt recent AI technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine learning applications—essentially pattern identification algorithms—to measure customer preferences in real time and predict demand, which it then serves through an ultrafast supply chain.
As AI accelerates the production of affordable, fashionable clothing more than ever, Shein is one of the brands rising pressure to become more sustainable. The company has committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
But climate advocates and researchers say the company’s rapid manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently carbon-intensive — and its exploit of AI software to catalyze those operations could raise emissions. Those concerns have been reinforced by Shein Third Annual Sustainability Reportpublished delayed last month, which showed the company almost doubled its carbon emissions between 2022 and 2023.
“AI is enabling fast fashion to become an ultrafast fashion industry, and Shein and Temu are at the forefront of that,” said Sage Lenier, executive director of Sustainable and Just Future, a climate nonprofit. “They literally couldn’t exist without AI.” (Temu is a fast-growing e-commerce titan whose merchandise market rivals Shein’s in variety, price and sales.)
In the 12 years since Shein was founded, the company has gained a reputation for its exceptionally effective production, which has reportedly generated more than 30 billion dollars The company’s revenue in 2023. Although estimates vary, Shein’s recent project could take up just 10 days become clothing, with up to 10,000 items added to the site every day. The company reportedly offers as many as 600,000 items for sale at any given time, with an average price tag of about $10. (Shein declined to confirm or deny the figures.) One market analysis found that 44 percent of Gen Zers in the United States buy at least one item from Shein every month.
That scale translates into a huge environmental footprint. According to the company’s sustainability report, Shein emitted a total of 16.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023 — more than four coal-fired power plants throw away within a yearThe company has also come under fire for textile wastehigh level microplastic pollutionand exploitative labor practices. Polyester — a synthetic textile known to release microplastics into the environment — makes up 76 percent of all fabrics, and only 6 percent of that polyester is recycled, according to the report.