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> Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily... Shein and Temu shipping all through planes. Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am won

by llsf 3y ago

> Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily... Shein and Temu shipping all through planes. Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great. But the amount of trash that it would generate is staggering. It feels like it is a massive transfer of trash from one country to the rest of the world... done in individual packages... sent by plane. I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it.

woodruffw 3y ago
> Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great. But the amount of trash that it would generate is staggering. It isn't. If you want to dress sustainably, you should be primarily buying second-hand clothes (and ideally ones that are made from textiles that survive years of wear and wash). Fast-fashion is an ecological disaster, both in terms of the sheer volume of low-quality material produced and its byproducts (e.g. dye discharges in water from factories).
- MivLives 3y ago
  I've been thrifting a bunch recently and it's amazing how different even a 90s tshirt feels compared to a modern one. There's a heft and thickness to it that just doesn't seem to be the priority anymore. Also everything now seems to not be just cotton but blend in something that lets it stretch.
- neom 3y ago
  I mentioned to a colleague today the sweater I was wearing was 12 years old (discussing this exact fast fashion subject). He said "you just kept it in the closet for 12 years?" - Nope, it's my fav sweater to wear. I handwash it and hang dry it, as I do all my clothes, and it was made in Portugal from quality materials, works out to $35 a year (~$400 sweater).
  - reaperman 3y ago
    You handwash all your clothes? Your underwear, your workout clothes, your socks, your T-shirts?
    - pmontra 3y ago
      Not the person you asked the question to but in my case the answer is yes, except for my underwear. That goes in the washing machine at 30 C (86 F). Workout clothes are plastic, some T-shirts are plastic too, some are cotton. Socks are cotton or wool. I put them in a bucket of cold water with a detergent made for that (sorry, I don't know the English word for that.) Liquid for wool and socks, powder for the other clothes. Five minutes are enough. Up to here is not worse that putting everything into a washing machine and you can do it in any house. The tedious part is washing away the soap with cold water. That takes time. I hang the T-shirts and the large clothes and wash them with a hand shower. You need a place to do it without flooding the house. For small clothes and socks, the bathroom sink. Squeeze out water gently by compression, don't twist. Then I hang them to dry. From here on is the same as with a washing machine. Once they stop dripping water you can put them anywhere. In winter you need either a window in the sun or a source of heat or it will take forever and they'll smell. Don't put them directly on a heater, that would destroy anything plastic quickly. Leave a span. This is not something that can be done in every house but if you can then clothes will last much longer especially the workout plastic ones. Check the detergents for water temperature, colors, type of fabric, time etc. Edit: make sure to let air flow somehow because that water in the clothes must get out of the house or you'll get mold especially in some climates.
      - R0flcopt3r 3y ago
        How is this any different from a washing machines handwash/delicate program? It soaks in soap with no movement, cold temperatures, then rinse it gently with water.
        neom 3y ago
        I wish that's how mine did it, even on the hand wash/delicate setting, it still does 3 spin cycles (although I'd guess not as fast as the other modes). But more importantly, I hand wash so I can spot clean. Easiest way to spot deep stains etc is when the clothes are wet and you can hand inspect them. I'm so obsessive about this stuff i won't even accept any fade in the blacks, and no yellowing in my whites.
- madduci 3y ago
  > It isn't. If you want to dress sustainably, you should be primarily buying second-hand clothes (and ideally ones that are made from textiles that survive years of wear and wash). Fast-fashion is an ecological disaster, both in terms of the sheer volume of low-quality material produced and its byproducts (e.g. dye discharges in water from factories). Well, clothes that survive years of wear and wash are not so easy to be found. And sustainable clothes that you can buy at your local shops are incredibly expensive and the resulting quality is still meh. Fast fashion is on the rise since people don't want to spend big money on clothes that are almost comparable to the ones sold by fast fashion stores, but just with a big label on it. IMHO the big blame isn't on consumers or on fast fashion stores, but on the competition, that lowered their quality, raised their prices and expected to make profit from this strategy. To close the circle, people buy cheap things, including clothes, because their purchasing power hasn't scaled up like inflation, but in many countries the purchasing power has dropped (example: Italy, where salaries are stuck to the 1990 levels)
- Sparkyte 3y ago
  Technically walking into any store and buying clothes is more eco sustainable than anything Temu or Shein. Doesn't even have to be second hand as long as it was bulk delivered to that store and bought by you on that spot.
  - herbst 3y ago
    To be fair. The whole concept falls apart if you drive there with your car.
    - gruez 3y ago
      Is driving a single car to the mall really that much worse than a delivery truck making deliveries?
      - herbst 3y ago
        Yes. To lazy to cite, especially as the article was German and written for Switzerland, however the point was that even a badly organized delivery route and same day delivery is in most cases more efficient than driving a 5 or 10 minute distance.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  The problem is that choosing clothes that will last is extremely hard for a layperson. I have €20 shirts that have lasted for more than a decade and €100 shirts that looked like crap after a few months. Brand is not a guarantee either, I have bought superficially similar products from the same brand with radically different results (I suppose they were made in different factories). Same goes for material, there is 100% cotton clothing that is great and other is absolute crap. Over the years I have found a few brands that I more or less trust, but the process involves a staggering amount of trial and error because most brands are just either bad or inconsistent. In particular, European brands seem to be the worst offenders (and I say this as an European). American brands seem somewhat more reliable, although this might be just statistical noise from small sample or selection bias from American brands that reach Europe. In general, I find the whole textile industry outraging. No other physical goods industry that I know has so little regard for the customer. What would happen if a brand sold 14" laptops that actually were 13" and short-circuited your whole home when plugged in? At the very least people would return them, and probably many would sue. But with clothes, it's very common to buy size 36 pants that turn out to be smaller than your size 34 pants (apparently, they haven't mastered the technology of measuring tape) and that bleed dye and spoil your whole laundry when you wash them. And we have somehow collectively decided that those obviously avoidable things are acceptable. Why?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > In general, I find the whole textile industry outraging. No other physical goods industry that I know has so little regard for the customer. I'd point at software, but I guess it's not physical, so the next "best" thing would be... just about all the bottom-feeder dirt cheap stuff from Aliexpress/Temu/etc., that I'm even more apalled that they exist now that I hear they're being shipped by air. Anyway. > And we have somehow collectively decided that those obviously avoidable things are acceptable. Why? I imagine for the same reason most tech sucks: because the market is supply-driven, and doesn't get any useful feedback from the customers. Buyers choose from what is available, and the choice is only between bearing the bullshit, or doing without a category of goods - which for clothes is even harder than with smartphones... It's neat little local minimum in developed markets: even when the barrier to entry is low (much easier to launch a clothes line than build a smartphone), the most profitable move for all competitors is still to double-down on the race to the bottom. Or put another way: customers have a certain amount of dissatisfaction they're willing to tolerate. Anything more satisfying than that limit is just leaving money on the table.
nkrisc 3y ago
> I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it. Humankind as a whole is not benefitting from this. It’s a net-negative. It’s a loan with future generations as collateral, one that those whom are responsible for this never intend to repay.
Jorge1o1 3y ago
I think the bigger issue than the environment, not to undervalue its importance, is that Shein and Temu literally use slave labor.
- c1sc0 3y ago
  Isn't all damage to the environment a kind of slave labor forced upon future generations who will have to work off the debt we give them?
- Spivak 3y ago
  Wait until you find out about how the chocolate gets made. https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ethical-chocolate-companies https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ethical-chocolate-compani...
  - benatkin 3y ago
    Not surprised to see Feastables on that list
  - imp0cat 3y ago
    But it is comparatively easy to get a "good" bar of chocolate, they are usually marked as "free trade" or something like that. With clothes, there usually is no such indicator.
    - markdown 3y ago
      Fair trade.
      - imp0cat 3y ago
        Right, that's the one.
    - herbst 3y ago
      There is no one label but there are good brands. Only very few in the big picture that care about sustainability other than pure green washing.
jwagenet 3y ago
I don’t have a citation for it, but supposedly returns are a significantly worse environmental problem, not just with these transcontinental shipments. At least with Amazon or Shein or whatever, the packages are shipped as a semi-efficient unit, even for the last mile of delivery. However returns are driven by individual vehicles to the return site, not necessarily in the original packaging, but perhaps, hopefully, bundled up to some degree back to the seller.
- WanderPanda 3y ago
  Also driving to the store (plus keeping excess stock of everything) to buy something must be much worse than just shipping it in a minimal box.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  Shein probably has the return site or handling agent throw most of it in the trash, which is terrible.
  - gorbypark 3y ago
    There's a street market here (Spain) every weekend and one of the vendors has taken up selling what I presume are Shein returns. It's just tables full of Shein bags with clothes in them.
lynx23 3y ago
The goals of individuals and society are often at odds with each other... So I wonder why you assume a random webshop should/could have a positive effect for society.
Beijinger 3y ago
"Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great." I don't know these companies, but I am pretty sure those products are shit. SOD. Shit on demand. Just looked at the prices. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck quacks like a duck... "Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily.." How boring. They should do just in time production. Have AI create an infinite amount of products that are JIT produced when you order.
- kobalsky 3y ago
  > Just looked at the prices. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck quacks like a duck... fees to sell on amazon are very high. clothing is specially expensive with referral fees of 17% plus per unit fixed fees for shipping and returns. on low price products these fixed fees are specially onerous. on a $15 product all fees could be 2/3 of the price. so shein could sell you something for $6-8 and get as much as they would by selling it on Amazon $15. that said, amazon will start lowering clothing fees in april. who would have thought that some competition would be good for customers.
TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
It absolutely isn't sustainable. Here's shocking reporting about H&M's recycling program for example: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/O8PAyb/har-dumpas-h-m-kladerna-du-atervinner https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/O8PAyb/har-dumpas-h-m-k.... And that's just what happens at the end of a product's life.
Sparkyte 3y ago
These products are beyond bad for the environment. Maybe something somewhere in their storefront is legit okay, but over production and spam products is a terrible strategy for a longterm business model.
jesterson 3y ago
> I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it. I am sure the same can be applied to many situations, including numerous one you (and I) are engaging. It just depends how much moral grounds you would like to project to feel better. What is actually benefiting society? There is likely slightly more than one answer to that.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  The amusing part is that throughout history long-distance trade has been driven by luxuries - silk, pepper, furs, tea, etc. All thoroughly unnecessary stuff, unless you happen to like it and are able to afford it. Also, no one needs their morning shot of FB or HN ...
  - jesterson 3y ago
    Exactly so! Societal and economical implications of seemingly "useless" transactions lay far off binary representation of bad/good. And we may speculate for hours whether fur or golf accessories "good for society" and there likely will be no consensus on the matter :)
    - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
      You also get by-products like geographical maps and ocean-crossing ships ...
      - jesterson 3y ago
        Economical implications are even wider - you employ more seafarers who send money home raising domestic income in poorer countries
tpm 3y ago
> I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. The grand scheme of things being something like 70 million new passenger cars being sold each year. Now that's a lot of future trash.

by llsf 3y ago

woodruffw 3y ago

> Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great. But the amount of trash that it would generate is staggering. It isn't. If you want to dress sustainably, you should be primarily buying second-hand clothes (and ideally ones that are made from textiles that survive years of wear and wash). Fast-fashion is an ecological disaster, both in terms of the sheer volume of low-quality material produced and its byproducts (e.g. dye discharges in water from factories).

MivLives 3y ago
I've been thrifting a bunch recently and it's amazing how different even a 90s tshirt feels compared to a modern one. There's a heft and thickness to it that just doesn't seem to be the priority anymore. Also everything now seems to not be just cotton but blend in something that lets it stretch.
neom 3y ago
I mentioned to a colleague today the sweater I was wearing was 12 years old (discussing this exact fast fashion subject). He said "you just kept it in the closet for 12 years?" - Nope, it's my fav sweater to wear. I handwash it and hang dry it, as I do all my clothes, and it was made in Portugal from quality materials, works out to $35 a year (~$400 sweater).
- reaperman 3y ago
  You handwash all your clothes? Your underwear, your workout clothes, your socks, your T-shirts?
  - pmontra 3y ago
    Not the person you asked the question to but in my case the answer is yes, except for my underwear. That goes in the washing machine at 30 C (86 F). Workout clothes are plastic, some T-shirts are plastic too, some are cotton. Socks are cotton or wool. I put them in a bucket of cold water with a detergent made for that (sorry, I don't know the English word for that.) Liquid for wool and socks, powder for the other clothes. Five minutes are enough. Up to here is not worse that putting everything into a washing machine and you can do it in any house. The tedious part is washing away the soap with cold water. That takes time. I hang the T-shirts and the large clothes and wash them with a hand shower. You need a place to do it without flooding the house. For small clothes and socks, the bathroom sink. Squeeze out water gently by compression, don't twist. Then I hang them to dry. From here on is the same as with a washing machine. Once they stop dripping water you can put them anywhere. In winter you need either a window in the sun or a source of heat or it will take forever and they'll smell. Don't put them directly on a heater, that would destroy anything plastic quickly. Leave a span. This is not something that can be done in every house but if you can then clothes will last much longer especially the workout plastic ones. Check the detergents for water temperature, colors, type of fabric, time etc. Edit: make sure to let air flow somehow because that water in the clothes must get out of the house or you'll get mold especially in some climates.
    - R0flcopt3r 3y ago
      How is this any different from a washing machines handwash/delicate program? It soaks in soap with no movement, cold temperatures, then rinse it gently with water.
      - neom 3y ago
        I wish that's how mine did it, even on the hand wash/delicate setting, it still does 3 spin cycles (although I'd guess not as fast as the other modes). But more importantly, I hand wash so I can spot clean. Easiest way to spot deep stains etc is when the clothes are wet and you can hand inspect them. I'm so obsessive about this stuff i won't even accept any fade in the blacks, and no yellowing in my whites.
madduci 3y ago
> It isn't. If you want to dress sustainably, you should be primarily buying second-hand clothes (and ideally ones that are made from textiles that survive years of wear and wash). Fast-fashion is an ecological disaster, both in terms of the sheer volume of low-quality material produced and its byproducts (e.g. dye discharges in water from factories). Well, clothes that survive years of wear and wash are not so easy to be found. And sustainable clothes that you can buy at your local shops are incredibly expensive and the resulting quality is still meh. Fast fashion is on the rise since people don't want to spend big money on clothes that are almost comparable to the ones sold by fast fashion stores, but just with a big label on it. IMHO the big blame isn't on consumers or on fast fashion stores, but on the competition, that lowered their quality, raised their prices and expected to make profit from this strategy. To close the circle, people buy cheap things, including clothes, because their purchasing power hasn't scaled up like inflation, but in many countries the purchasing power has dropped (example: Italy, where salaries are stuck to the 1990 levels)
Sparkyte 3y ago
Technically walking into any store and buying clothes is more eco sustainable than anything Temu or Shein. Doesn't even have to be second hand as long as it was bulk delivered to that store and bought by you on that spot.
- herbst 3y ago
  To be fair. The whole concept falls apart if you drive there with your car.
  - gruez 3y ago
    Is driving a single car to the mall really that much worse than a delivery truck making deliveries?
    - herbst 3y ago
      Yes. To lazy to cite, especially as the article was German and written for Switzerland, however the point was that even a badly organized delivery route and same day delivery is in most cases more efficient than driving a 5 or 10 minute distance.
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
The problem is that choosing clothes that will last is extremely hard for a layperson. I have €20 shirts that have lasted for more than a decade and €100 shirts that looked like crap after a few months. Brand is not a guarantee either, I have bought superficially similar products from the same brand with radically different results (I suppose they were made in different factories). Same goes for material, there is 100% cotton clothing that is great and other is absolute crap. Over the years I have found a few brands that I more or less trust, but the process involves a staggering amount of trial and error because most brands are just either bad or inconsistent. In particular, European brands seem to be the worst offenders (and I say this as an European). American brands seem somewhat more reliable, although this might be just statistical noise from small sample or selection bias from American brands that reach Europe. In general, I find the whole textile industry outraging. No other physical goods industry that I know has so little regard for the customer. What would happen if a brand sold 14" laptops that actually were 13" and short-circuited your whole home when plugged in? At the very least people would return them, and probably many would sue. But with clothes, it's very common to buy size 36 pants that turn out to be smaller than your size 34 pants (apparently, they haven't mastered the technology of measuring tape) and that bleed dye and spoil your whole laundry when you wash them. And we have somehow collectively decided that those obviously avoidable things are acceptable. Why?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > In general, I find the whole textile industry outraging. No other physical goods industry that I know has so little regard for the customer. I'd point at software, but I guess it's not physical, so the next "best" thing would be... just about all the bottom-feeder dirt cheap stuff from Aliexpress/Temu/etc., that I'm even more apalled that they exist now that I hear they're being shipped by air. Anyway. > And we have somehow collectively decided that those obviously avoidable things are acceptable. Why? I imagine for the same reason most tech sucks: because the market is supply-driven, and doesn't get any useful feedback from the customers. Buyers choose from what is available, and the choice is only between bearing the bullshit, or doing without a category of goods - which for clothes is even harder than with smartphones... It's neat little local minimum in developed markets: even when the barrier to entry is low (much easier to launch a clothes line than build a smartphone), the most profitable move for all competitors is still to double-down on the race to the bottom. Or put another way: customers have a certain amount of dissatisfaction they're willing to tolerate. Anything more satisfying than that limit is just leaving money on the table.

nkrisc 3y ago

> I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it. Humankind as a whole is not benefitting from this. It’s a net-negative. It’s a loan with future generations as collateral, one that those whom are responsible for this never intend to repay.

Jorge1o1 3y ago

I think the bigger issue than the environment, not to undervalue its importance, is that Shein and Temu literally use slave labor.

c1sc0 3y ago
Isn't all damage to the environment a kind of slave labor forced upon future generations who will have to work off the debt we give them?
Spivak 3y ago
Wait until you find out about how the chocolate gets made. https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ethical-chocolate-companies https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ethical-chocolate-compani...
- benatkin 3y ago
  Not surprised to see Feastables on that list
- imp0cat 3y ago
  But it is comparatively easy to get a "good" bar of chocolate, they are usually marked as "free trade" or something like that. With clothes, there usually is no such indicator.
  - markdown 3y ago
    Fair trade.
    - imp0cat 3y ago
      Right, that's the one.
  - herbst 3y ago
    There is no one label but there are good brands. Only very few in the big picture that care about sustainability other than pure green washing.

jwagenet 3y ago

I don’t have a citation for it, but supposedly returns are a significantly worse environmental problem, not just with these transcontinental shipments. At least with Amazon or Shein or whatever, the packages are shipped as a semi-efficient unit, even for the last mile of delivery. However returns are driven by individual vehicles to the return site, not necessarily in the original packaging, but perhaps, hopefully, bundled up to some degree back to the seller.

WanderPanda 3y ago
Also driving to the store (plus keeping excess stock of everything) to buy something must be much worse than just shipping it in a minimal box.
mdekkers 3y ago
Shein probably has the return site or handling agent throw most of it in the trash, which is terrible.
- gorbypark 3y ago
  There's a street market here (Spain) every weekend and one of the vendors has taken up selling what I presume are Shein returns. It's just tables full of Shein bags with clothes in them.

lynx23 3y ago

The goals of individuals and society are often at odds with each other... So I wonder why you assume a random webshop should/could have a positive effect for society.

Beijinger 3y ago

"Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great." I don't know these companies, but I am pretty sure those products are shit. SOD. Shit on demand. Just looked at the prices. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck quacks like a duck... "Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily.." How boring. They should do just in time production. Have AI create an infinite amount of products that are JIT produced when you order.

kobalsky 3y ago
> Just looked at the prices. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck quacks like a duck... fees to sell on amazon are very high. clothing is specially expensive with referral fees of 17% plus per unit fixed fees for shipping and returns. on low price products these fixed fees are specially onerous. on a $15 product all fees could be 2/3 of the price. so shein could sell you something for $6-8 and get as much as they would by selling it on Amazon $15. that said, amazon will start lowering clothing fees in april. who would have thought that some competition would be good for customers.

TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago

It absolutely isn't sustainable. Here's shocking reporting about H&M's recycling program for example: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/O8PAyb/har-dumpas-h-m-kladerna-du-atervinner https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/O8PAyb/har-dumpas-h-m-k.... And that's just what happens at the end of a product's life.

Sparkyte 3y ago

These products are beyond bad for the environment. Maybe something somewhere in their storefront is legit okay, but over production and spam products is a terrible strategy for a longterm business model.

jesterson 3y ago

> I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it. I am sure the same can be applied to many situations, including numerous one you (and I) are engaging. It just depends how much moral grounds you would like to project to feel better. What is actually benefiting society? There is likely slightly more than one answer to that.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
The amusing part is that throughout history long-distance trade has been driven by luxuries - silk, pepper, furs, tea, etc. All thoroughly unnecessary stuff, unless you happen to like it and are able to afford it. Also, no one needs their morning shot of FB or HN ...
- jesterson 3y ago
  Exactly so! Societal and economical implications of seemingly "useless" transactions lay far off binary representation of bad/good. And we may speculate for hours whether fur or golf accessories "good for society" and there likely will be no consensus on the matter :)
  - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
    You also get by-products like geographical maps and ocean-crossing ships ...
    - jesterson 3y ago
      Economical implications are even wider - you employ more seafarers who send money home raising domestic income in poorer countries

tpm 3y ago

> I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. The grand scheme of things being something like 70 million new passenger cars being sold each year. Now that's a lot of future trash.