A Deep Dive Into Shein: Part 1
- Zevez Zalay
- Nov 17, 2025
- 5 min read
Daily new styles, or a new supply chain and production practices?
Zevez Zalay
November 15th, 2025, 10:54 pm ET
Related Topics
Shein, fast fashion, overconsumption, overconsumption glamorization, capitalism, China, Kenya, landfills, water pollution, carbon emissions, Shein hauls, human rights, climate change, greenwashing, Chris Xu, textile waste, textile pollution, micro influencers, eCommerce algorithms, online retail, women’s fashion
Hypothetically, if you wanted to purchase 10,000 new pieces of clothing per day, where would you shop for that? Amazon may work, or Shein. Unlike any other fast-fashion online retailer, the fast-fashion giant Shein actually produces upwards of 10,000 new garments a day (Roberts, 2022). This is to keep their options online constantly churning out, so that there is something new every time you come back to shop.
Human Rights Violations
However, as you can imagine, this quota is not easy to capture. The majority of their third-party factory workers are subjected to 12 to 18-hour days, are paid as little as 14 cents per item completed, are given penalties if mistakes are made, are put in unsafe working conditions, and are subjected to verbal and physical violence (Lin, 2025; Roberts, 2022). Many of these actions aren’t even legal within China, such as not having a single day off every month, let alone Shein’s code of conduct they push out for good public relations (Roberts, 2022). Which begs the question, which is more important, the human rights of their workers in Guangzhou, China, or being able to better serve their consumers by giving them one of the largest daily catalogs of women’s clothing online?
Environmental Concerns
As Shein items are made so rapidly in the Shein villages in China, none of their items are meant to make it past one or two wears, with many of them breaking in some way past the third try on (Roberts, 2022). Therefore, many consumers find that after a couple of cycles of laundry, belt loops are ripped from their skinny jeans, wires escape their underwire casing, or the fabric just isn’t in a wearable condition anymore. But, where does this deemed “unwearable clothing” go after its single use is done with? In America, while chemical and mechanical textile recycling plants exist, they are far and few between.
If you don’t happen to live in the top 15 states for textile recycling, your chances of actually getting your single-use Shein items onto their next useful life are slim. Luckily, here in Rochester, NY, we have several avenues for getting your used clothing to a drop-off box–many of them supported by EcoPark, Goodwill, and the Re-Clothe NY Coalition. However, consumers have to be aware and care enough about the environmental consequences of not getting their items to one of these bins. Additionally, they have to do enough research to know what qualifies a garment for recycling in New York, and what factors lead it to go into the trash anyway. The friction for textile recycling is high, even in a government-supported state. The New York State Association for Reduction, Reduce, and Recycling (NYSAR³) claims, “The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation has determined that approximately 1.4 billion pounds of clothing and textiles are disposed of in the state each year.” (NYSAR³, 2025). Thus, is it really okay for Shein to depend on U.S.-funded programs to handle the masses of waste that are imported into our country?
So, if American consumers aren’t fully informed about where their broken garments should go, where do these broken items end up? Even if the items are returned to Shein, it is cheaper for them to throw the items out for you than to put them back into circulation (Williams, 2022). Thus, roughly 2,150 items are thrown out by Americans alone every second, whether you are putting your out-of-style items into the bin yourself or not (Bloomberg, 2022). The Bloomberg article also offers an interactive aspect to the statistic by showing you how many articles of clothing have been added to landfills around the world just during the time you are browsing their site. I highly recommend checking it out through the link below:
What’s next?
So, on the American side of things, it's great to doom-scroll on Shein’s eCommerce website and find new things that you didn’t get to see the day before, but it's not magic at play; someone is suffering for the kindness towards our wallets. For Shein specifically, they, like much of the fast-fashion industry, continue to put profits before the ethics towards the environment, workers, and even their stakeholders through hefty promises they cannot seem to hold themselves to.
On one side, if the company keeps operating the way that they do, it will be able to continue at a steady pace of growth. This keeps their executives and shareholders happy, as their return on their monetary or time investment continues to pay off. On the other hand, they have to look at those profit margins and ask themselves if the trade-off is truly worth it. Have they witnessed the consequences of their actions in person, or ever trialed what it’s like to have those circumstances inflicted upon them? Without that intense experience, it can be really easy for top executives to say that it's worth it. They get another million dollars in their pocket, and some workers out in Guangzhou work one extra hour–there are plenty of ways to rationalize their behavior and make it sound like a no-brainer decision. Companies inherently have a duty to serve all their stakeholders, which includes the environment, their outsourced laborers in their supply chain, and being truthful to their consumers. One purpose that companies have is to benefit the areas they inhabit through taxes, but primarily, they are there to provide a product or service, not an ethical choice that consumers have to weigh out. Thus, by not taking into account the duty that they have to all their stakeholders, and honing in on the desires of their shareholders, not only are they violating stakeholder theory, but deontology as a whole. Thus, regardless of the potential decrease in their profit margins or upset from some shareholders, they have a duty to those they employ and serve–and they cannot ignore it.
Finally, most of the executives and decision makers at Shein are not exercising their skills of virtue, which is to act in means that reflect good character traits. Many of the actions pushed to the forefront of the media show signs of greed, selfishness, and ignorance of their own actions. While they may be satisfied with the size of their wallets, it's hard to say if deep down they can truly be proud of the destruction they have caused–or the violations they have made towards the virtuous characters their child-selves wanted them to be–as seen in the 3rd stage of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.
In part two of “A Deep Dive Into Shein”, we will be exploring the deeper history of Shein to see how they ended up going from an online retailer none of us had heard of before 2019, to one of the biggest eCommerce sites that revolutionized their industry.
Resources
Bloomberg News. (2022). The fashion industry’s environmental impact. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-fashion-industry-environmental-impact/?embedded-checkout=true
Roberts, A. [Prime Video]. (2022). Inside the SHEIN Machine [Film]. https://www.primevideo.com/region/na/detail/Inside-the-Shein-Machine/0Q4S1LAZ7XZCD9MTW6Q8J1XEY4
NYSAR3. (n.d.). Re-Clothe NY. https://www.nysar3.org/page/re-clothe-ny-78.html
Promoleaf. (n.d.). Clothing recycling analysis. https://www.promoleaf.com/blog/clothing-recycling-analysis
SHEIN. (n.d.). New in: All. https://us.shein.com/new/New-In-All-sc-0021884529.html
Swain, I. (2022, April 10). Shein: The unacceptable face of throwaway fast fashion. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/apr/10/shein-the-unacceptable-face-of-throwaway-fast-fashion
Lin, C. [Cinthia Lin]. (2025, April 19). Inside SHEIN’s factory village [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd228YQPn-0