In 2023, fast fashion giant Shein is everywhere. Planes crisscross the globe, carrying small packages of ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers' “#sheinhaul” videos promoted the company's style on social media, racking up billions of views.
Data will be built, collected and analyzed at every step. To manage all this information, the fast fashion industry has begun to adopt emerging artificial intelligence technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine learning applications (essentially pattern recognition algorithms) to measure customer preferences and predict demand in real-time, then deliver services through an ultra-fast supply chain.
As artificial intelligence makes it possible to produce affordable, on-trend clothing faster than ever before, Shein is also facing growing pressure to be sustainable. The company has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions by 25% by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
But climate advocates and researchers say the company's lightning-fast manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently emissions-intensive, and using artificial intelligence software to catalyze those operations could increase its emissions. Those concerns were heightened by Shein's third annual sustainability report, released late last month, which showed the company's carbon dioxide emissions would nearly double between 2022 and 2023.
“Artificial intelligence is making fast fashion an ultra-fast fashion industry, and Shein and Temu are pioneers in this,” said Sage Lenier, executive director of the climate nonprofit Sustainable and Just Future. “They really can’t exist without artificial intelligence.” (Temu is a fast-rising e-commerce giant with a merchandise marketplace that rivals Shein in terms of variety, price and sales.)
Founded 12 years ago, Shein is known for its uniquely prolific manufacturing, with the company reportedly on track to generate more than $30 billion in revenue by 2023. can become a reality. The company reportedly offers up to 600,000 items for sale at any given time, with an average price of about $10. (Shein declined to confirm or deny the reported numbers.) One market analysis found that 44% of Gen Z in the United States buy at least one item from Shein each month.
This scale translates into huge environmental impacts. According to the company's sustainability report, Shein emitted a total of 16.7 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2023 – more than four coal-fired power plants emit in a year. The company has also been criticized for textile waste, high levels of microplastic contamination and exploitative labor practices. According to the report, polyester, a synthetic textile known for releasing microplastics into the environment, makes up 76% of its total fabric, of which only 6% is recycled.
A recent investigation found that factory workers at Shein's suppliers were working 75-hour weeks, more than a year after Shein pledged to improve working conditions within its supply chain. While Shein's sustainability report shows that labor conditions are improving, it also shows that in a third-party audit of more than 3,000 suppliers and subcontractors, 71% were working at companies A through E. ’s grade range received a grade of C or lower—average 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 artificial intelligence was not core to operations, he said that was not the case when speaking at a retail conference earlier this year.
“We are using machine learning technology to accurately predict demand in what we believe is the most advanced way possible,” he said. Pernot-Day told the audience that all of Shein's 5,400 suppliers have access to an artificial intelligence software platform that provides them with up-to-date information about customer preferences, and they can change the products they produce in real time to match that preference.
“This means we can only produce very few copies of each garment,” he said. “That means we have very little waste and very little inventory waste.” The company says it stocks an average of 100 to 200 copies of each item, in contrast to more traditional fast-fashion brands, which typically produce thousands per season. items and try to predict trends months in advance. Shein calls his model “on-demand,” while a technology analyst interviewed by Vox in 2021 called it “real-time” retail.
At the conference, Pernot-Day also said the technology could help the company capture “micro-trends” in what customers want to wear. “We can detect this and we can act on it in ways that I think we're really pioneering,” he said. A designer recently filed a class-action lawsuit in New York District Court claiming that the company's artificial intelligence market analysis tools were used in an “industrial-scale scheme to engage in systematic digital copyright infringement of the work of small designers and artists,” excluding Create designs on the Internet and send them directly to the factory for production.
In an emailed statement to Grist, a Shein spokesperson reiterated Peter Pernot-Day's assertion that technology enables companies to reduce waste and become more efficient, saying the company's increase in emissions in 2023 was attributable to booming business . “We do not believe that growth and sustainability are antithetical,” the spokesman said.
Industry publication The Business of Fashion analyzed Shein's sustainability report and found that the company's emissions last year were nearly double its revenue, making Shein the highest-emitting company in the fashion industry. By comparison, Zara's emissions grew at half the rate of its revenue. For other industry giants such as H&M and Nike, sales rose from the previous year while emissions fell.
Lu Sheng, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, said Shein's emissions are particularly high because of its reliance on air transportation. “Artificial intelligence is widely used in the fashion industry. This does not necessarily mean that artificial intelligence is bad,” Lu said. “The problem lies in the nature of Shein's particular business model.”
Other major brands ship goods in bulk overseas, preferring ocean shipping due to lower costs, and have suppliers and warehouses in many countries, which reduces the distance goods have to travel to reach consumers.
According to the company's sustainability report, 38% of Shein's climate footprint comes from transportation between its facilities and between customers, and a further 61% comes from other parts of its supply chain. Although the company is headquartered in Singapore and has suppliers in a handful of countries, most of its clothing is produced in China and air-shipped to customers in individually addressed packages. In July, the company shipped about 900,000 units a day to the United States.
A spokesperson for Shein told Grist the company is developing a decarbonization roadmap to address the footprint of its supply chain. Recently, the company increased its inventory at U.S. warehouses, allowing it to offer faster delivery times to U.S. customers, and increased its use of cargo ships, which are more carbon-efficient than cargo planes.
“Controlling carbon emissions in the fashion industry is a very complex process,” Lu said, adding that many brands use artificial intelligence to improve operational efficiency. “It really depends on how you use artificial intelligence.”
Research shows that using certain AI technologies can help companies become more sustainable. “This is the missing piece,” said Shahriar Akter, associate dean of business and law at the University of Wollongong in Australia. In May, Ackert and his colleagues published a study that found that when fast fashion suppliers used artificial intelligence data management software to comply with the sustainability goals of big brands, the companies were more profitable and had higher emissions. few. Atek said a key use of the technology would be to closely monitor environmental impacts such as pollution and emissions. “Before AI-based tools, this kind of tracking wasn't available,” he said.
Shein told Grist that it does not use machine learning data management software to track emissions, one of the uses of artificial intelligence in Akter's research. But the company's much-touted use of machine learning software to predict demand and reduce waste was another use of artificial intelligence in the study.
Regardless, the company is still a long way from achieving its goals. Grist calculated that Shein's reported emissions reductions in 2023, through measures such as providing solar panels to suppliers and opting for ocean shipping, accounted for about 3% of the company's total carbon emissions that year.
Lenier from Sustainable and Just Future believes that the use of artificial intelligence in the fast fashion industry is unethical. She said largely unregulated technology allows brands to exacerbate harmful impacts on workers and the environment. “People who work in fast fashion factories are now under tremendous pressure to produce more and faster,” she said.
Both Lenier and Lu believe that the key to a sustainable fashion industry is convincing customers to buy less. Lu said that if companies use artificial intelligence to increase sales without changing unsustainable practices, their climate footprint will also increase. “This is the overall effect of being able to offer more products that are popular in the market and encourage consumers to buy more products than in the past,” he said. “Of course the overall carbon impact will be higher.”
This article was originally published by Grist as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism partnership to enhance coverage of climate stories.
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