This story initially appeared in Grist and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.
In 2023, the fast-fashion large Shein was in every single place. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothes from 1000’s of suppliers to tens of hundreds of thousands of buyer mailboxes in 150 international locations. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” movies marketed the corporate’s stylish types on social media, garnering billions of views.
At each step, knowledge was created, collected, and analyzed. To handle all this info, the quick vogue business has begun embracing rising AI applied sciences. Shein makes use of proprietary machine-learning functions — basically, 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 reasonably priced, on-trend clothes quicker than ever, Shein is among the many manufacturers beneath rising stress to turn out to be extra sustainable, too. The corporate has pledged to cut 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 the usage of AI software program to catalyze these operations could possibly 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 vogue to turn out to be the ultra-fast vogue business, Shein and Temu being the fore-leaders of this,” stated 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, worth, and gross sales.)
Within the 12 years since Shein was based, it has turn out to be recognized 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 might take as little as 10 days to turn out to be a garment, and as much as 10,000 objects are added to the positioning every day. The corporate reportedly provides as many as 600,000 objects on the market at any given time with a median price ticket of roughly $10. (Shein declined to verify or deny these reported numbers.) One market evaluation discovered that 44 p.c of Gen Zers in the US purchase at the least one merchandise from Shein each month.
That scale interprets into huge environmental impacts. In line with 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 beneath fireplace for textile waste, excessive ranges of microplastic air pollution, and exploitative labor practices. In line with the report, polyester — an artificial textile recognized 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.
