And The Hazardous Waste It Emits

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It's hard to believe it's less than 18 months since we all learned the word 'Temu'. And just a few months after that, as early as February this year, Temu was flying some 4,000 tons of goods each day, while Shein accounted for 5,000 tons. (That has now gone up.)  

Estimates suggest Shein wins 320m orders a year. Or 880,000 every day – roughly half Amazon's 1.6m daily packages.

Shein brings out some 300,000 new products each year, with 600,000 items for sale at any one time. To put that into some context, clothes retailer H⁘M launches about 4,500 new products each year – 1.5% of what Shein does. Inditex, owner of brands such as Zara, releases some 12,000 new products annually.  

In last year's ' winners and losers of 2023 podcast ', we noted: "There's going to be things to watch. One is how traditional forwarders are dealing with ecommerce and whether they've got their act together. But most of all, I think that regulators are going to start having more scrutiny over this.  

"We keep hearing about illegal operations, misdeclarations on dangerous goods, vats, customs, taxes. I don't think it's being properly applied, and I don't think it's being properly regulated. And sooner or later there will be a lot more scrutiny."  

That has certainly come to pass. Between April and June, The Loadstar ran its ecommerce series, just as regulators were indeed starting to investigate, particularly in the US.  

But one aspect that has not yet been extended the same level of scrutiny is the environmental harm caused by the huge amounts of airfreighted ecommerce. This, surely, will enter mainstream thinking in 2025. But perhaps not in the way we expect.