This story initially appeared in Grist and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.
In 2023, the fast-fashion big Shein was all over the place. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothes from hundreds of suppliers to tens of hundreds of thousands of buyer mailboxes in 150 nations. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” movies marketed the corporate’s fashionable kinds on social media, garnering billions of views.
At each step, information was created, collected, and analyzed. To handle all this info, the quick trend business has begun embracing rising AI applied sciences. Shein makes use of proprietary machine-learning purposes — primarily, pattern-identification algorithms — to measure buyer preferences in actual time and predict demand, which it then providers with an ultra-fast provide chain.
As AI makes the enterprise of churning out inexpensive, on-trend clothes sooner than ever, Shein is among the many manufacturers below rising stress to turn into extra sustainable, too. The corporate has pledged to scale back its carbon dioxide emissions by 25 p.c by 2030 and obtain net-zero emissions no later than 2050.
However local weather advocates and researchers say the corporate’s lightning-fast manufacturing practices and online-only enterprise mannequin are inherently emissions-heavy — and that using AI software program to catalyze these operations may very well be cranking up its emissions. These issues had been amplified by Shein’s third annual sustainability report, launched late final month, which confirmed the corporate practically doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.
“AI permits quick trend to turn into the ultra-fast trend business, Shein and Temu being the fore-leaders of this,” mentioned Sage Lenier, the manager director of Sustainable and Simply Future, a local weather nonprofit. “They fairly actually couldn’t exist with out AI.” (Temu is a quickly rising ecommerce titan, with a market of products that rival Shein’s in selection, value, and gross sales.)
Within the 12 years since Shein was based, it has turn into identified for its uniquely prolific manufacturing, which reportedly generated over $30 billion of income for the corporate in 2023. Though estimates differ, a brand new Shein design could take as little as 10 days to turn into a garment, and as much as 10,000 objects are added to the positioning every day. The corporate reportedly gives as many as 600,000 objects on the market at any given time with a median price ticket of roughly $10. (Shein declined to substantiate or deny these reported numbers.) One market evaluation discovered that 44 p.c of Gen Zers in america purchase at the least one merchandise from Shein each month.
That scale interprets into large environmental impacts. Based on the corporate’s sustainability report, Shein emitted 16.7 million whole metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023 — greater than what 4 coal energy crops spew out in a yr. The corporate has additionally come below fireplace for textile waste, excessive ranges of microplastic air pollution, and exploitative labor practices. Based on the report, polyester — an artificial textile identified for shedding microplastics into the setting — makes up 76 p.c of its whole materials, and solely 6 p.c of that polyester is recycled.
