The Perils of Greenwashing

Introduction

Fast fashion is essentially the mass production of cheap, poor quality, disposable clothing with the intent to offer trendy apparels well in time to assuage the customers’ need to keep up with the ever dynamic fashion spiral without burning a hole in their pocket. However, every stage in the fast fashion supply chain comes with huge environmental and societal costs as it renders emphasis on quantity rather than quality.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of fast fashion items are neither recycled nor donated. Instead, they either end up in landfills or get incinerated. Our clothes can take as long as 200 years to decompose and It is no surprise that our planet is increasingly getting susceptible to an imminent environmental crisis owing to more and more unnatural and toxic materials that go into the extensive production of clothing by some global yet negligent brands.

One such brand is Shein. Founded in China in 2008, Shein has been flourishing in the fast fashion industry and has recently surpassed Amazon as the most installed shopping app in the U.S and Canada and ranks number four when it comes to countries that visit Shein’s website the most. Clearly it has become a rage amongst fast fashion consumers. The brand offers clothes that are cheap by and large. With countless options and low prices, they’re never short on merchandise. However, It’s a sad yet perhaps unsurprising truth that within this constant influx of new styles are items allegedly copied from smaller, independent creatives.

Moreover, Shein has also been accused of how unethical the fast fashion brand is despite its “claims of sustainability” the practice of which is referred to as “Green Washing.” Greenwashing is essentially the practice of claiming to be ethical and sustainable in its approach and thereby misinforming the consumers about their compliance with various ethicality standards, however not actually following up on them in reality.

What makes it even harder to curb the brand’s pervasiveness is that it largely banks on large scale digital marketing tactics to establish its widespread presence and propagates its messages through fashion bloggers and popular celebrities with millions of followers on social media which is why it is wildly popular among GenZ who are impulse buyers. Therefore, it becomes all the more imperative to delve into these realms of the apparel industry because people seldom know what exists behind the facade of glitz and glamour.

From environmental impact to human rights abuses, fast fashion has a lot to answer for. The first step in tackling this industry is awareness. The more people who know about what’s going on behind the scenes, the more we can start to get our voices heard and push for change.

Literature Review

There exists a paucity of relevant scientific literature, discussions and discourse around the environmental as well as human health consequences that the fast fashion industry poses on the global front even though the industry is responsible for immense amounts of social as well as environmental deterioration at every stage of the fashion supply chain. The contribution of the industry with regard to the environment has been by and large detrimental which is why it is high time that we recognize fast fashion as a part of global environmental injustice.

There is an emerging need for Low and middle income countries to regulate their occupational and safety standards. More research needs to be dedicated to the examination of the health hazards and other consequences induced by the production as well as the consumption of fast fashion in LMICs particularly. More so, high income countries too must work towards mitigating the adverse effects of the proliferation of the fast fashion industry by cutting down their fast fashion consumption and also through redefined trade policy and regulations. (R. Bick, E. Halsey & C.C. Ekenga, 2018)

It is necessary that the fashion industry across the globe arrives at a common consensus with respect to the enforcement of an international standardized policy to which all countries and fashion brands ranging from large multinational brands to the smaller ones adhere to, only then will the process of attaining sustainability worldwide will become faster. Moreover, it is important to take account of the fact that consumers lie at the heart of the fast fashion industry and if they become conscious of their consumption patterns and cut down their fast fashion consumption and exhort big brands to restructure their production cycle, to policy makers to uphold legislation regarding mitigating climate change; and to improve labour laws and supply chain transparency; consumers will be able to realise a significant change in the fashion industry per se.

Given the massive scale of operation of the fast fashion industry globally and moreover its operation in a highly capitalistic and competitive market, it becomes virtually impossible to think of revamping the fashion industry such that it remains 100 percent sustainable. For, the manufacturing of clothing requires the use of natural resources or fibres that need to be produced and then after undergoing the manufacturing process, it has to be taken care of post purchase.Therefore, it is inevitable to maintain absolute sustainability at every point of the supply chain. However, despite this, the industry must strive to get better and closer to the sustainability standards in order to restructure the industry for a better future. (Grace Costa, 2021)

Social and economic factors are highly prominent to the textiles and apparel industry. The industry is known as being highly labour intensive. It often plays a vital role in the social and economic progress in developing countries. A more complete perspective may be one that considers the trade-off between costs and benefits within the social, economic, and environmental factors. A product category may show environmental impact and the associated cost for eradicating the problem, but at the same time it may directly bring financial benefits for the enterprise.

Within the framework of sustainability, we believe all these factors need to be carefully examined and weighted. This perspective is particularly important for the textiles and apparel industry considering the critical role it plays in many developing countries. (Yan Luo, 2021)

In our aging society, disabilities are indeed very prevalent, and it is thus crucial to determine ways in which individuals with disabilities can experience meaningful involvement in everyday life activities and social roles. Clothing is an important aspect in our lives that help us fulfil social or cultural roles, and can indicate social status or convey individual, occupational, or sexual differentiations.

The clothing industry, once populated by numerous tailors, appears to now be largely composed of fast-fashion manufacturers and retailers that cater principally to mass consumerism, mass-produced ready-to-wear garments designed to fit ‘most’ of the population. However, research has reported that individuals with different or changing morphologies secondary to aging or a physical disability find it difficult to find clothing that facilitates optimal participation. (Alida Esmail, 2020)

Green marketing scholars Strähle and Hauk argue that companies’ final aim will always be to make profit. Companies do not have an interest in informing its customers about its negative environmental effects, as this might result in the consumer rethinking their consumption behaviour. Instead, it is better to keep a sustainable image. Companies tend to position themselves in a more sustainable way because they gain a better image from the customers, and thus, make profit. This means that companies do not produce more sustainably than other companies, the difference is that they make the customer believe they do.

By integrating transparency with socially responsible values into the fashion company’s supply chain, a company can be considered sustainable. A company should present its sustainable actions, and it must be 66 true and objective, which include the negative aspects and what efforts that have not resulted well, as this is the principle of transparency. Niinimäki explains that transparency should not be the only positive marketing message offered, otherwise it can turn into greenwashing instead. (Josephine Blesserholt, 2021)

Regulators have started to take notice of fast fashion’s fewer savoury practices, though their efforts have failed to keep pace with the industry or have just plain failed. In the U.K., a special parliamentary committee that spent a year studying the environmental and labour impact of fast fashion made several recommendations, including levying a one-penny garment tax that would be used to improve textile recycling; the government rejected them all.Cheap clothes come with severe environmental consequences, and this troubled Tricia. The industry’s labour practices are also suspect, and commenters chided her for working with companies that had terrible track records. She temporarily cut ties with Shien after it was accused of using child labour in its factories. (Rachel Monroe, 2021)

Objective: To analyse the growing dominance of the Chinese brand Shein in the fast

fashion industry and debunking its practice of “greenwashing”.

Research method: Qualitative analysis (Case study)

A case study is a suitable research design to gain concrete, in-depth knowledge about a particular real-world topic. It allows you to explore the important characteristics and implications of the case.

We chose the case study method to conduct our research because:

• A case study can be used to explain, describe, or explore events or phenomena in the everyday contexts in which they occur.
• Case studies give room to the diversity of perspectives instead of when one is using a single point of view as in a survey response or an interview. It abolishes chances of potential bias by allowing gaining a greater understanding of the subject under investigation.
• The starting phase of the case study research allows the researcher to decide what the process will be when it comes to selecting the single or multiple real-life cases for examination.

The main areas of our research are:

• Issues regarding Shein’s adverse environmental Impact.
• Cases where Shein has been accused of stealing designs from independent artists.
• Cases concerning labour violations by Shein.

Environmental Impact

Fast Fashion’s impact on the planet is huge. The pressure to reduce costs and speed up production time means absolute negligence and disregard for the environment. In the years ahead, the environmental damage by the industry is likely to be disastrous for the planet. For, in reality, fast fashion uses cheap materials. Brands use toxic chemicals, dangerous dyes, and synthetic fabrics which seep into water supplies in foreign countries where the clothing is made and at home when the clothing is washed. Moreover, use of cheap, toxic textile dyes also renders the fashion industry the second largest polluter of clean water globally after agriculture. It’s no surprise that once-thriving rivers in China, India, Bangladesh, wrecked by wastewater effluent from factories, have transformed into biologically dead zones fraught with cancer-causing chemicals.

Shein for the record, in order to remain economical uses unsustainable virgin synthetics like polyester and nylon that are made from fossil fuels and plastic. What we also know, by popular opinion, Shein apparels are widely known to be one time use mostly as they wear out soon and are disposed of. However, unlike their short lifespans in our closets, clothing made from these materials do not decay. This means that every piece of clothing we buy from Shein will likely spend much more time in a landfill than they will ever spend in our wardrobes. Besides that, their fake leather and fur are also virgin synthetics, PU leather to be precise which is made from plastic with no non-synthetic, recycled vegan alternative available. To top it all, Shein packages are in fact also mostly plastic bags.

Evidently, the brand’s sustainability practices do not align with its public statements on the issue as already stated before, it hides its toxicity behind bogus claims on the social responsibility page of its website and thus brazenly perpetuates the practice of Corporate Greenwashing which indirectly causes customers to inadvertently contribute to environmental degradation in more ways than one. Regardless, the fast fashion brand’s deceitful activities have been garnering enough attention of late as a host of notable websites across the web have corroborated the same with authentic feedback from real customers as well as experts. A popular non-profit organisation in the US called “Remake” scored Shein in one of its articles using their in-house sustainability metrics and the brand scored a zero in the assessment for obvious reasons.

Speaking of Shein being ‘socially responsible’, one of the claims on its website is that it ensures to alleviate environmental impact by creating goods in small quantities of 50-100 which reduces waste. However, one might wonder if the brand refers to the production of 50-100 garments of each style or altogether. Obviously, the former is the answer which eventually amounts to thousands of garments in totality every week.

Hence, more sales implies more waste. It also offers recycling programs in several parts of the world where participants are offered gift cards in lieu of their donated clothes which again is used as a mere eyewash for sustainability because anyway their apparels are manufactured with unsustainable materials.

Moreover, the brand is also not transparent about what happens to the clothes later, how much is recycled or resold and what is it being recycled into? The brand does not delineate what exactly constitutes their production process including the materials used, dyes, animal products, water and textile waste, etc. And with textile dyeing being the second largest source of river pollution, being transparent with their production line is the only way for any of us to really know if Shein is as ‘environmentally friendly’ as they claim to be.

Copyright infringement

Fast fashion has always been about delivering high style to the masses, and today this is still very much the case. Established in 2008, the platform aims to become a fashion e-commerce platform for Generation Z. Focusing exclusively on fast-fashion clothes, it adds more than 200 new items every day and only needs two weeks from sample to finished product, according to the company’s WeChat blog. The trending designs and surprisingly affordable prices have attracted many young customers around the globe.

Shein has been accused of “deliberate and calculated” trademark infringement by a raft of both major and independent brands and is facing legal action.

With its accelerated growth and continual need for trendy new items, copying has become part of the fast fashion cycle. This ultimately hurts small business owners, who work to create original designs to then have them stolen and resold for a lesser price. Though sites like Shein are marketed as accessible for the everyday consumer, they leave designers like Diallo wondering how they can make room for themselves in the fashion industry.

Shein, which is now widely thought to be the most visited fashion site on the planet, has been accused of having a “clear intent to sell counterfeits” by a footwear giant in a complaint filed in California.

Dr Martens highlighted products labelled as “Marin Boots” on Shein, adding that it not only created direct copies of its products, but also used “photographs of genuine Dr Martens footwear to entice customers to its website to buy fake copy footwear”.

Its model enables it to take an item from design to hangar in a matter of days, while severely undercutting even its fast-fashion rivals in price.

Labour Violations

Gen Z prioritizes sustainability when making purchases more than the older generations, and it’s in a corporation’s best interest to market to this desire. To appeal to their fastest-growing demographic, fast fashion retailers push their environmental PR campaigns to the forefront of their brand without making significant changes to their supply chains, materials, or labour practices.

It should not come as a surprise that Shein makes as much effort for the customers as it does for the planet, which is next to none. It is rated very poorly here, too. Aside from examining some percentage of its supply chain, it is making no headway to improving its labour conditions. Workers should have the right to a regular wage, collective bargaining, an abuse-free work environment, and some protection from the impacts of COVID-19.

Fast fashion is made in sweatshops that have unsafe working conditions and child labour. UNICEF estimates that one sixty-eight million children between the ages of 5 and 17 are engaged in child labour.

Due to a critical lack of transparency, very little is known about the full extent of Shein’s production chain. On the social responsibility page of the website, they address the topic of child labour: “We strictly abide by child labour laws in every country we operate in. Neither we nor any of our partners are allowed to hire underage children. Any partners or vendors found to have violated these laws are terminated immediately and reported to the authorities.”

The statement disregards the fact that child labour laws change significantly from country to country. In Bangladesh, where many fast fashion factories are located, their amended child labour laws allow children as young as fourteen to work. Despite that, 17.5 per cent of male Bangladeshi children of age from seven to fourteen work. According to a report published by UNICEF, it is predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic will force more children into starting work due to economic and financial strains on their households.

Many of Shein’s manufacturing suppliers cut costs by contracting orders to small workshops located inside rundown handshake buildings and residential blocks so densely packed together, locals joke that neighbours in different towers can almost touch each other. These workshops frequently flout Chinese labour laws and are considered a fire. Many are illegal businesses and have no contract with Shein, making it difficult to verify whether workers are well-treated.

Meanwhile, warehouse staff at a significant Shein logistics centre said they struggled to cope with the intense and hard work, which also involved walking dozens of kilometres a shift with only a few rest stops. Shein enlists many of the order pickers via dispatched agencies which is a controversial practice in China that can prevent the laborers from defending their rights. For example, they know that some of their suppliers in Guangzhou contract a large part of their orders to their friends and family in Guangxi province, as the labour costs there are much lower. Shein is trying to gain greater control over those factories.

SHEIN claims it provides its employees with a living wage and industry-leading benefits such as health insurance, bonuses, and investment plans. The website also claims the company insists their vendors follow the same standards without offering transparency about who their suppliers are. Nowhere on Shein’s website does the brand give customers an understanding of the production process. Where are Shein’s factories? What are the brand’s codes of conduct, wage structure, and working conditions standards? If Shein is genuinely proud of its supply chain conditions, why isn’t the brand open about giving this information? Shein avoids the elephant in the room about working conditions: the truth is that several countries don’t have the same labour standards as the United States, which provides SHEIN and several other fast fashion companies an easy, shoulder-shrug of plausible deniability.

Conclusion

The fast fashion business model was pioneered in the 1990s by the founder of Inditex, the parent company of Spanish retailer Zara. Zara notoriously abandoned the concept of fashion seasons for a year-long cycle of production, which introduced customers to novel items every few weeks. Its success prompted other Western designers and retailers to follow its lead into the next decade. Likewise, retailers migrated most of their manufacturing process overseas to countries with negligent labour laws, where wages can be low and working overtime (without additional pay) is common. This, of course, made fashion companies more profitable, as shoppers became hooked on a cycle of novelty.

The drop in garment prices essentially, over the last 20 years has allowed us to buy more and more clothes. We now have 5 times more clothes than our grandparents had. It felt great until we found out what was hiding behind this trend. From the dangerous working conditions in garment factories to the sheer volume of greenhouse gas emissions and waste the fashion industry produces, the impact of how our clothes are made can’t be ignored any longer.

In reality, this continuous accumulation of cheap garments is only possible because of a constant reduction of production costs. This, in turn, has serious consequences on our health, planet and our textile workers’ lives. The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world just after the oil industry. And the environmental damage is increasing as the industry grows. While venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs tout Shein as the future of fashion, the company’s rise didn’t occur in a vacuum. Its success is predicated on a confluence of factors, from geopolitical trade policies to a decades-old, disaggregated global fashion ecosystem.

Despite all these ethical loopholes, if someone still chooses to shop at Shein consciously or out of sheer necessity, that’s not necessarily a problem. As the problem is by and large, the massive quantum of purchase made all at once, which as already mentioned before, is a highly likely consequence common with almost all the cheaper fast fashion brands. However, this does not imply that over-consumption of ethical clothing is somehow justified since one becomes automatically sustainable by merely purchasing from exorbitantly priced ethical brands regardless of the excess quantity of consumption.

Now the question that arises is what can we do as consumers? To begin with, what is actually intrinsic to sustainable fashion is to mitigate consumption and treat clothing as long-term staples. One must also understand that ethical brands need to cost more because they pay their workers fairly, use higher-quality sustainable materials, have independent audits, and operate on a smaller scale than fast fashion. Moreover, one might not find clothing in accord with “trends” because those are antithetical to slow fashion as those alleged trends only last a year or so and then that clothing no longer remains cool after a point of time. Essentially speaking, trends can be more sustainable if one commits to wearing them for years and years altogether. Nonetheless If someone is still looking for cheaper and trendier clothing, thrifting or shopping previously used apparels online is the way to go.

Last but not the least, one of the most important steps in tackling this industry is awareness. The more people who know about what’s going on behind the scenes, the more we can start to get our voices heard and push for change. The next step is to advocate for brands that are actively fighting against fast fashion. If enough of us demand change, the fashion industry will need to reassess its current practices within the supply chain and eventually the dream of inhabiting a sustainable planet will be restored in the long run.