“Do you source cotton from China?” A simple question, but one Shein failed to answer eight times during a recent hearing with the UK Business and Trade Committee.
What policymakers really wanted to get at was: does the ultra-fast fashion retailer source cotton from Xinjiang, northwestern region of China where the Chinese government has been accused of human rights abuses and forced labour? Shein has previously said it has “zero tolerance” for forced labour and that it requires contracted manufacturers to only source cotton from approved regions — but in the hearing, its representatives remained tight-lipped.
Shein had been invited to give evidence alongside fellow China-owned retailer Temu — which appeared relatively candid during the hearing by comparison — as part of an inquiry into employment rights in the UK. The committee was also seeking reassurance that poor labour standards are not being imported into Britain by companies like Shein, which hopes to list on the London Stock Exchange this year.
The hearing focused squarely on labour practices. However, Shein’s roundly criticised evasion tactics — Yinan Zhu, Shein’s general counsel, refused to answer multiple questions about its supply chain and labour standards, to the frustration of MPs — underscored its reputation for a lack of transparency across all areas of its business. “Frankly, committee members were horrified that a company selling a billion pounds worth of products, which wants to list on the London Stock Exchange, point-blank refused to explain the basics about how they make their goods,” Liam Byrne, MP and chair of the Business and Trade Committee, tells Vogue Business.
Campaigners say that Shein’s lack of transparency sparks fresh concern ahead of the company’s anticipated initial public offering (IPO). One of the big questions that remains unanswered: what impact would an IPO have on its already sky-high emissions? This has been largely overlooked by regulators to date, sustainability advocates say, despite Shein’s exponential growth.
Some suggest that this is because a regulatory spotlight on emissions would mean giving airtime to the divisive concept of degrowth, which requires systemic introspection about the role of exponential growth in upholding the current economic model. Unpicking the very yardstick each nation measures its success by is a hard sell to rally bipartisan efforts, unlike labour practices.
Without the same level of scrutiny, experts say Shein’s climate impacts will remain largely unchecked — and its climate claims increasingly difficult to track.
Fashion’s biggest polluter
With concentrations of atmospheric carbon rising higher than ever and fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions on track to grow 40 per cent by 2030, the industry can scarcely afford another super polluter. Yet, since first calculating its baseline emissions in 2021, Shein’s absolute emissions have risen by 176 per cent overall. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, they rose by 83 per cent — from 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2e to 16.7 million.
After the leap in 2023, Shein surpassed Zara owner Inditex’s emissions (16.4 million tonnes in 2023) for the first time, surpassing the Spanish clothing company as the industry’s biggest emitter. Shein’s figure is over fourfold what the fashion and leather goods sector of LVMH emitted (four million tonnes) in 2023, and over sixfold Kering Group’s total carbon footprint (2.6 million tonnes) the same year.
In 2022, Shein explicitly linked a production volume increase of 57 per cent with an emissions increase of 52 per cent, and has since repeatedly made correlations between strong business growth and emissions rises. Dr Hakan Karaosman, associate professor at Cardiff University and co-founder of Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH), believes an injection of capital will only make the brand more “aggressive”, catalysing the manufacture of higher product volumes. “Shein will oversize everything,” he predicts.
Generally, unless management intends to use the proceeds to pay down any debt, the expected outcome of any IPO is company growth, explains Dr Pete Clark, associate professor at UCL School of Management. Drawing upon recent patterns, there is a logical link between an IPO, company growth and further emissions growth. For opponents to Shein’s stock market float — including public campaign ‘Say No To Shein’ and corporate activist coalition Eko — it’s a clear path to even greater social and environmental impacts.
Unknown impacts
A spokesperson for Shein told Vogue Business that it is currently working to develop a comprehensive decarbonisation road map to achieve its long-term target of reaching net-zero no later than 2050, with support from external partners. Though still being finalised, a “large part” of the work will be focused on initiatives in areas where it has the more sizable emissions, such as the Scope 3 subcategories of purchased goods and services, as well as transportation and distribution, according to an emailed statement.
“In our most recent sustainability and social impact report, we have committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, in addition to our previously announced near-term target to reduce emissions by 25 per cent across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2030,” the spokesperson said. “Since the report was published, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has approved Shein’s near-term science-based emissions reduction target.”
They continued: “We are currently working to develop a comprehensive decarbonisation roadmap to achieve our long-term target to reach net-zero no later than 2050, with the support of external partners. While we are still in the process of refining and finalising the roadmap, a large part of our work will be focused on initiatives in areas where we have the largest emissions, for instance in the Scope 3 sub-categories of purchased goods and services, and transportation and distribution.”
But critics argue that such measures aren’t enough, and without top-down changes starting with the business model itself, we’ll simply see continued growth in Shein’s emissions. Its SBTi-approved target is against a 2023 baseline; if achieved, the reduction would not even return the company back to its 2021 starting point.
Experts say Shein’s reliance on virgin polyester is of particular concern, given its high volumes. Polyester accounts for 75.7 per cent of Shein’s fibre portfolio (6 per cent is recycled). Despite its fossil fuel origins, Lisa Bergstrand, founder of sustainable fashion consultancy Bergstrand Consultancy, says it likely has a positive influence on Shein’s emissions figures. This is because polyester often scores lower on materials emissions databases when it comes to the environmental impact due to reportedly requiring less energy and water to produce than natural fibres (this is the main criticism of the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint methodology and the Higg MSI, among others).
“I would recommend using natural fibres to all of my clients, but you would still probably get lower emissions by using virgin polyester than you would from using organic cotton, depending on the database,” says Bergstrand, tapping into a broader industry issue that concerns the making of industry emissions calculations based on disputed generalisations.
According to Bergstrand, for Shein to have any chance of mitigating its emissions while maintaining growth post-IPO, it would have to meaningfully adopt circular practices to generate revenue separate from the production of new polyester-based products. The problem? “I don’t think people that buy such cheap stuff manage to resell it and get money out of it,” she says. “There’s also the factor of it being very fashionable, meaning it’s going to feel and look old in a year. I think it’s very tricky for [Shein] to operate circular business models.”
In 2023, over 115,000 pre-owned Shein items were listed for sale by more than 95,000 unique sellers on the US-based Shein Exchange platform. But it’s unclear how many were actually sold, how long they lasted in their second life and where they ended up afterwards. And uptake figures are a drop in the ocean compared to up to the 10,000 new SKUs added to the Shein website daily, along with its estimated 17.3 million active shoppers in the US.
Transparency: An IPO upside?
Though it does not disclose how many new products it makes and sells, Shein often responds to criticism of its scale by referencing its on-demand model whereby it “never produces more than what the market actually wants to purchase”, as Peter Pernot-Day, Shein’s head of strategic and corporate affairs for North America and Europe, told the audience at the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum in October. But as a business predicated on quick trend turnover, whose rate of product release far outstrips its rivals’, many knock-on impacts of its driving business model are unaccounted for.
When Shein awarded The Or Foundation $15 million as part of its Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fund in 2022 — a move that drew accusations of greenwashing — the non-profit’s co-founder and executive director Liz Ricketts accepted it as an “acknowledgement that [Shein’s] clothing may be ending up in… Kantamanto [secondhand clothing market in Accra, Ghana]”. While Shein accounts for production back to the raw materials stage in its emissions calculations, the brand does not quantify the carbon impact of its used clothes being exported to the Global South; or being discarded after just 11 to 30 wears; or of returns from Europe travelling thousands of miles to clothing dumps in Chile, per January 2025 reporting by Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. (In response to Aftonbladet, Shein said: “In Europe, approximately 90 per cent of our returns are repackaged and put back into our warehouse system for sale to customers.”)
The hope is that, if an IPO goes ahead, it may at least force Shein to be more transparent. “Once you’ve said you’re going to IPO, you get things out in the disclosure and you’ve given increased visibility to these ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube,” says Clark. For many investors, disclosure won’t be enough, he adds — they will want robust strategies to reduce the risks they could be exposed to.
To that end, Shein announced the establishment of a Global External ESG Advisory Board and Regional Strategy and Corporate Responsibility Committees in December 2024 to “provide the leadership team with insights and recommendations to assist the company in achieving its corporate responsibility objectives”. News of a $5 million donation to circularity programme Africa Collect Textiles — mirroring its controversial 2022 investment in The Or Foundation — and the establishment of the philanthropic Shein Foundation followed on 17 January.
Still, critics are worried about the implications of an IPO, and the message it would send to the wider industry — that growth at all costs is acceptable. “What Shein is doing is just a broken business model that will perpetrate ecological collapse with long-term, intergenerational social consequences,” says Karaosman. “How can I be convinced that fashion supply chains will be decarbonised when we keep churning out millions of garments that use fabrics and yarns and raw materials [made] from petroleum? It’s garbage in, garbage out.”
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