Shein skyrocketed to fame since its opening in 2008. Influencers everywhere give the brand a fair amount of attention through spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes and then posting hauls and reviews. With a wide variety of clothes, people around the world have been mesmerized by the cheap trendy attire, though they don’t last and quickly go out of style. Recently, Shein has drawn criticism over their impact on the environment.
“I have never bought from Shein and I don’t plan on it because I don’t support their brand or their impacts on the world,” junior Katie Avery said.
Stores like Shein, H&M, Zara, and Forever 21 are some of the most powerful fast fashion brands. Fast fashion is a business model that describes the mass production of low-price and low-quality trendy clothes to quickly add them into stores inventory to keep up with trend and demand. The problem is that since the clothes are made so fast, the quality is well below average.
This causes most customers to only wear the items a few times and then discard them in the trash or donate them. According to Textile Exchange, these clothes are mostly made of synthetic materials so they aren’t recyclable. Tons of wasted clothes are now sitting in landfills and the microplastics that the materials produce are making their way into the oceans adding to pollution.
“I don’t throw it away but half the stuff I get is either see through or of awful quality so it just sits in one of my drawers,” sophomore Maya Kenyon said. Although Kenyon is a frequent Shein customer, she does admit that most of the clothes arrive to her in poor quality. Products may seem cheap at the time of purchase, but the overall price of having to rebuy clothing, costs more than spending more on higher quality clothes less frequently.
Not only are the customers throwing away the clothes, but so are the companies. With the clothes being produced in mass and only being on trend for a short period of time, they need to get rid of the unsold stock. But how?
The simple answer is they destroy them. Most times the clothes are burned causing toxic gases to be released in the atmosphere but some stores also shred them and throw them into the landfill. In 2017, Operation X, a Danish television program, revealed that the Swedish H&M throws out 12 tons of clothes a year. That’s the equivalent to two full grown elephants of crop tops and bathing suits.
In October 2022, after years of bad press and exposure to the company’s negative environmental effects, Shein announced its partnership with a nonprofit named Apparel Impact Institute. The goal is to implement energy efficiency by reducing the supply chain emissions by 25 percent by 2030. Shein has spent $7.6 million on this
partnership. Some of their goals are to minimize carbon impact and reduce the use of energy, water and chemical consumption in over 500 of Shein’s facilities internationally.
According to Synthetics Anonymous 2.0, Shein produces 6.3 million tons of carbon dioxide which is equivalent to 180 coal-fired power plants. This is due to the production process using an excessive amount of virgin polyester and oil. With an excessive amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, too much heat is being trapped into the environment.
This causes the Earth to become too hot. Climate.gov states this causes an imbalance in the greenhouse effect: the natural process of the sun’s energy either being reflected back to space or absorbed and re-radiated onto Earth when it reaches the atmosphere. The issue with excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is that more of the sun’s energy is absorbed and re-radiated by them.
