In 2023, fast fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Around the world, planes carried small packages of his ultra-cheap clothes thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos advertised the company’s trendy styles on social media, which the billions of views.
At each step, data was 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 recognition 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 selling affordable, modern clothing faster than ever, Shein is one of the brands among them increasing pressure to also become more sustainable. The company has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050.
But climate advocates and researchers say the company’s lightning-fast manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently emissions-heavy — and that using AI software to catalyze these operations could increase its emissions. That concern was reinforced by Shein’s third annual sustainability reportreleased late last month, which showed the company nearly doubling its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.
“AI is enabling fast fashion to become the ultra-fast fashion industry, and Shein and Temu are leading the way,” said Sage Lenier, the executive director of Sustainable and Just Future, a climate nonprofit. “They literally couldn’t exist without AI.” (Temu is a fast-rising e-commerce titan, with a marketplace of goods that rivals Shein’s variety, price and sales.)
In the 12 years since Shein was founded, it has become known for its unique prolific production, said to be more than $30 billion of revenue for the company in 2023. Although estimates vary, a new Shein design could be as little as 10 days to become a garment, and up to 10,000 items are added to the site every day. The company apparently offers as much 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.) 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 massive environmental impacts. According to the company’s sustainability report, Shein released 16.7 million total metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023 – more than four coal-fired power plants spit out in a year. The company has also come under fire for textile wastehigh levels of microplastic pollutionand exploitative labor practices. According to the report, polyester—a synthetic textile known for shedding microplastics into the environment—makes up 76 percent of its total material, and only 6 percent of that polyester is recycled.
And a recent investigation found factory workers at Shein suppliers routinely work 75-hour weeks, more than a year after the company pledged to improve working conditions within its supply chain. While Shein’s sustainability report indicates that labor conditions are improving, it also shows that in third-party audits of more than 3,000 suppliers and subcontractors, 71 percent received a score of C or lower on the company’s grade scale of A to E — mediocre at best.
Machine learning plays an important role in Shein’s business model. Although Peter Pernot-Day, Shein’s head of global strategy and corporate affairs, told Business Insider last August that AI was not central to his activities, he indicated otherwise during a presentation at a retail conference at the beginning of this year.
“We use machine learning technologies to accurately predict demand in a way that we think is cutting edge,” he said. Pernot-Day told the audience that all of Shein’s 5,400 suppliers have access to an AI software platform that gives them updates on customer preferences, and they change what they produce to match them in real time.
“This means we can produce very few copies of each garment,” he said. “This means we waste very little and have very little inventory waste.” The company says it stocks between 100 and 200 copies of each item on average — a stark contrast to more conventional fast fashion brands, which typically produce thousands of each item per season and try to anticipate trends months in advance. Shein calls his model “on demand,” while a technology analyst who spoke to Vox in 2021 called it “real-time” retail.
At the conference, Pernot-Day also indicated that the technology helps the company pick up “micro-trends” that customers want to wear. “We can detect it, and we can respond to it in a way that I think we’ve really pioneered,” he said. A designer who submitted a recent class action lawsuit in a New York district court alleges that the company’s AI market analysis tools are used in an “industrial-scale scheme of systematic, digital copyright infringement of the work of small designers and artists,” scraping designs off the Internet and sending them directly to factories for production.
In a statement emailed to Grist, a Shein spokesperson reiterated Peter Pernot-Day’s claim that technology enables the company to reduce waste and increase efficiency and suggested that the company’s increased emissions in 2023 can be attributed to booming business. “We don’t see growth as inconsistent with sustainability,” the spokesperson said.
An analysis of Shein’s sustainability report by the Business of Fashion, a trade publication, found that the company’s emissions last year rose by almost. double the rate of his income — making Shein the highest-emitting company in the fashion industry. By comparison, Zara’s emissions rose half as much as its revenue. For other industry titans, such as H&M and Nike, sales grew while emissions fell from the year before.
Shein’s emissions are particularly high because of its reliance on aviation, said Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. “AI has wide applications in the fashion industry. It’s not necessarily that AI is bad,” Lu said. “The problem is at the heart of Shein’s particular business model.”
Other big brands ship items overseas in bulk, prefer ocean shipping for its lower cost, and have suppliers and warehouses in a large number of countries, reducing the distances items need to travel to consumers.
According to the company’s sustainability report, 38 percent of Shein’s climate footprint comes from transportation between its facilities and to customers, and another 61 percent comes from other parts of its supply chain. Although the company is based in Singapore and has suppliers in a handful of countries, the majority of its garments are manufactured in China and airmailed in individually addressed packages to customers. In July, the company sent over 900,000 of this every day to the USA.
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Shein’s spokesperson told Grist that the company is developing a decarbonisation roadmap to address its supply chain footprint. Recently, the company increased the amount of inventory it is stored in US warehouses, which allows it to offer US customers faster delivery times, and increases its use of cargo ships, which more carbon efficient than cargo planes.
“Controlling the carbon emissions in the fashion industry is a very complex process,” Lu said, adding that many brands are using AI to make their operations more efficient. “It really depends on how you use AI.”
There is research that suggests that using certain AI technologies can help companies become more sustainable. “This is the missing piece,” said Shahriar Akter, an associate dean of business and law at the University of Wollongong in Australia. In May, Akter and his colleagues published a study found that when fast fashion suppliers used AI data management software to meet major brands’ sustainability goals, those companies were more profitable and emitted less. A key use of this technology, says Atker, is to closely monitor environmental impacts, such as pollution and emissions. “This kind of detection was not available before AI-based tools,” he said.
Shein did not respond to a request for comment on whether it uses machine learning data management software to track emissions, which is one of the uses of AI included in Akter’s study. But the company’s much-heralded use of machine learning software to predict demand and reduce waste is another of the uses of AI included in the research.
Regardless, the company has a long way to go before its goals are met. Grist calculated that the emissions Shein claimed to have saved in 2023 — with measures such as providing its suppliers with solar panels and opting for ocean shipping — amounted to about 3 percent of the company’s total carbon emissions for the year.
Lenier, of Sustainable and Just Future, believes there is no ethical use of AI in the fast fashion industry. She said the largely unregulated technology allows brands to intensify their harmful impact on workers and the environment. “The people who work in fast fashion factories are now under an incredible amount of pressure to get out even more, even faster,” she said.
Lenier and Lu both believe that the key to a more sustainable fashion industry is convincing customers to buy less. Lu said if companies use AI to boost their sales without switching to their unsustainable practices, their climate footprints will also grow accordingly. “This is the overall effect of offering more market popular items and encouraging consumers to buy more than in the past,” he said. “Obviously the overall carbon impact will be higher.”
