The ecommerce juggernaut – and the hazardous waste it emits

Oleksandr Brylov

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.  

And it’s all got to be sent somewhere.  

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. 

In May, US Customs & Border Protection began its clampdown, of which Seko Logistics became an early victim. Since then, not only has parcel scrutiny increased, but changes to advance data requirements were introduced, while there have also been, across continents, proposals to lower the de minimis; find fentanyl imports; check for forced labour in supply chains; increase security; and protect local business from cheap Chinese imports. On top of this came the ‘Russian threat’ – incendiary devices hidden in parcel networks to disrupt supply chain flows. That has further focused governments and authorities. 

But there is not a commentator out there who believes the ecommerce juggernaut can be stopped. The attraction of cheap goods is just too great for consumers bombarded by the ever-present message to buy more, now. The question for the ecommerce sector next year will be how it manages to adapt, quickly, to any and every new regulatory environment thrust in its way. And, whether it remains economic to airfreight all these cheap goods. Will we start to see any modal shift in ecommerce, with a greater use of ocean freight and warehousing – or even, more local production? Not yet, but it might well be coming.  

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. 

For holiday homework, I suggest you settle down with Netflix’s film, ‘Buy Now!’. Commentators, including the former CEO of Unilever, designers from Amazon and Apple and a former board member of Adidas, among others, admit that the current rate of production of goods is unsustainable – made more real in the film by AI-generated images of the sheer amount of stuff being made. According to the former Apple executive, 13m phones are binned every day. Some 15m unwanted clothing items arrive in Ghana (population, 34m) every week. (The film will put you right off ‘recycling’ by the way…) Adidas produced some 756m individual items in 2023. Where will they all go? 

Buy Now! suggests that we introduce a new metric for manufacturers: the amount of product they generate that will become waste. If companies’ best business model is to keep making new stuff so we that we buy more, it should also be incumbent upon them to have a plan for the end-of-life for all the goods they have made – and we have thrown away. The world simply isn’t big enough for 13m mobile phone to be discarded daily – we will drown in the (hazardous) waste. 

Happily, this is one metric that carriers, forwarders and hubs do not have to measure. But it is not too far a step to realise that, at some point, the world will have to stop buying. It won’t be in 2025 – but there is a shelf life for rampant consumerism. 

For now, it appears airlines are happy to mop up the cash that comes with ecommerce’s increasingly discredited business model. And no doubt 2025 will be more of the same. But at some point, the bubble will must burst.  

Hopefully, by then, airfreight will have moved on to the ‘Next Big Thing’…