Short read
On March 26, SHEIN published a 21-market, 15,000-consumer study on circularity. Within 48 hours, the trade press had framed it for us: "SHEIN frames circularity as convenience." "SHEIN claims consumer data shows circular habits." Most of us moved on.
Three days earlier, BCG and ReHubs published a report showing that Europe's textile collection infrastructure is collapsing. Of 13.3 million tonnes of post-consumer textile waste generated annually, only 1.5 million tonnes is collected, sorted and qualified for recycling. Major collectors in France, Germany and the UK have filed for insolvency or ceased operations.
Then SHEIN's consumers said the same thing from the other side. 43.1% want physical take-back bins. 43.6% would recycle if they knew where to go. 40.3% need convenient nearby facilities. Digital product passports ranked last at 15.6%.
Two reports. Same week. Same conclusion from opposite ends of the value chain. Only one was treated as evidence.
SHEIN is not credible on circularity. Their emissions rose 23.1% in 2024. Their €200 million Circularity Fund has no publicly disclosed deployments. H&M, on barely half the revenue, has invested meaningfully in recycled materials, textile-to-textile recycling, and permanent garment collection across 4,000 stores.
But the consumer data is real. And what it reveals is not a SHEIN problem. It is a gap in where investment is reaching. Significant resources are flowing into sorting infrastructure, recycling capacity, and digital traceability, much of it driven by EU legislation. That investment is necessary. But consumer engagement and collection at the point of retail, the part that actually gets a garment from a consumer's hands into the system, remains critically underfunded. Collection organisations are going bankrupt. Consumers are telling us they want physical, convenient, nearby places to bring things. Retail stores are the front line for both engagement and capture, and they are the piece of the puzzle that connects the consumer to the infrastructure being built behind them.
If the Ellen MacArthur Foundation had published these findings, they would already be on a slide in your next board deck. The fact that they came from SHEIN is precisely why they are worth reading.
The full article examines the data, the criticism, and what it means for physical retailers who already have the infrastructure SHEIN's customers are asking for.
Not the headline. Not the commentary. The actual report. All 40 pages.
On March 26, SHEIN published its 2025 Global Circularity Study. 15,461 consumers across 21 markets. The largest consumer circularity survey published this year. Within 48 hours, the trade press had responded.
"SHEIN frames circularity as convenience; experts say that misses the point."
"SHEIN claims consumer data shows circular habits."
Notice the language. Frames. Claims. Before a reader has opened the study, the headline has already told them how to feel about it. The data is positioned as spin. The findings are positioned as assertions to be challenged rather than evidence to be examined.
Three days earlier, BCG and ReHubs published a report on textile recycling infrastructure in Europe. It found that of 13.3 million tonnes of post-consumer textile waste generated annually, only 1.5 million tonnes is collected, sorted and qualified for recycling. One tonne in nine. Collection networks are not just insufficient. They are collapsing. BCG estimated that €8 to €11 billion in investment is needed to scale textile-to-textile recycling to just 15% of waste within a decade.
That report was covered respectfully across every trade publication. Nobody questioned the methodology. Nobody called it a claim.
Then, three days later, SHEIN's consumers said the same thing from the other side: 43.1% want physical collection points. 43.6% would recycle if they knew where to go. 40.3% need convenient nearby facilities. The supply side and the demand side arrived at the same conclusion in the same week. But only one report was treated as evidence.
Now ask yourself this. If the Ellen MacArthur Foundation had published the SHEIN data, would the headline have read "Ellen MacArthur Foundation claims consumer data shows circular habits"? Would we need experts to tell us it misses the point? Or would it already be on a slide in your next board deck?
I felt the same instinct you probably did when I saw the SHEIN headline. I catch myself doing it. I attend the conferences. I read the reports. I buy from brands I consider responsible. And somewhere in there, I start assuming that the people who don't do those things are the ones causing the problem. As long as the issue lives over there, with them, I don't have to ask whether the systems I've helped build are actually reaching anyone beyond people like me.
SHEIN just surveyed 15,461 of "them." I read the full circularity study. Then I read SHEIN's 111-page sustainability report. The consumer data is robust and revealing. SHEIN's own sustainability performance is not. Both things matter.
Two reports. Same week. Same conclusion from opposite ends of the value chain. BCG says collection infrastructure is collapsing. SHEIN's consumers say they want collection infrastructure and can't find it. Only one report was treated as evidence.
SHEIN's total greenhouse gas emissions hit 26.2 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2024, up 23.1% from the previous year. Their recycled polyester sits at 6.7% of total polyester sourced. Their €200 million Circularity Fund has no publicly disclosed deployments to date. Their garment collection amounts to pop-up events and a clothing swap in Tokyo that collected 2,200 kg in an entire year.
H&M, a mass-market retailer whose prices remain far more accessible than premium brands, operates on roughly $22 billion in annual revenue. SHEIN generates an estimated $38 billion (Financial Times). Nearly double. And yet it is H&M that has invested meaningfully: 89% recycled or sustainably sourced materials, a 24% reduction in Scope 3 emissions, the co-founding of Syre for textile-to-textile recycling, and permanent garment collection across more than 4,000 stores. Affordable pricing is not an excuse for inaction. A company generating nearly twice the revenue of H&M and investing a fraction of what H&M spends should be held to account for that gap.
So why am I asking you to read this survey? Because the 15,461 people who answered it are the consumers our industry claims to be building for. And what they said challenges us, not SHEIN.
When asked what would make them participate in circular fashion, consumers said:
Resale platforms: 43.8%
Physical take-back bins: 43.1%
Environmental footprint information: 18.8%
Digital product passports: 15.6%
Buried on page 17: when non-recyclers who cited "convenience" as a barrier were asked what convenient actually means, 34.1% said available in places I already visit, like supermarkets or shopping centres. Only 8.2% said accessible by public transport. Consumers are describing retail stores as the collection point they want.
Among non-recyclers, the factor that would most encourage them to start is knowing where and how to recycle (43.6%), followed by convenient nearby facilities (40.3%). Better understanding of environmental benefits ranked dead last at 17.8%. More information is the least effective intervention. More infrastructure is the most effective.
34.1% of consumers define "convenient" recycling as available in places they already visit. Only 8.2% said accessible by public transport. Consumers are describing retail stores as the collection point they want. Nobody has reported on this finding.
The BCG/ReHubs report makes this gap painfully concrete. In France, social enterprise Le Relais stopped all textile collection in mid-2025 and began unloading unsorted waste outside major retailers to protest underfunding. In Germany, SOEX and Texaid filed for insolvency in October 2024 and June 2025 respectively. In the UK, Textile Recycling International entered administration in early 2024 and the Textile Recycling Association warned of a "sector-wide collapse."
Now hold those facts alongside the investment priorities of the past three years. The industry has funded DPP pilots, traceability platforms, and environmental footprint calculators. It has convened working groups and published roadmaps. And while that work was underway, the organisations physically collecting and sorting textiles were going under.
I am not suggesting these are either/or investments. Both matter. But the imbalance is hard to ignore. We have been building the digital layer of a circular system while the physical layer beneath it buckled. That is not a criticism of any single organisation. It is a question about collective priorities, and one I think we all need to ask ourselves.
In France, Le Relais stopped all textile collection and began unloading unsorted waste outside major retailers to protest underfunding. In Germany, SOEX and Texaid filed for insolvency. In the UK, the Textile Recycling Association warned of a "sector-wide collapse." We have been building the digital layer of a circular system while the physical layer beneath it buckled.
Digital product passports are non-negotiable. Traceability matters. Getting the right product to the right recycling facility depends on knowing what a garment is made of. SHEIN, whose report reveals they have only "begun preparations" for DPP compliance through a single pilot, needs to stop dragging its feet.
But many DPP providers have built their pitch around consumer engagement, and this data should give them pause. 15.6% is not a rounding error. It is 15,000 consumers telling us that product-level digital information is not what moves them to act. DPPs create real value for recyclers, sorters, and regulators. That is where the case should be built. We can put QR codes on every product we want. Unless they deliver something immediately useful in the moment a consumer needs it, the consumers we need to reach are not scanning them.
Traceability without collection is record-keeping. A digital passport on a garment that ends up in mixed municipal waste has achieved nothing. The passport needs somewhere to arrive.
The reflexive narrative about fast fashion consumers is that they buy disposable clothing, wear it once, and throw it away. 41% of respondents report wearing everyday basics more than 50 times, broadly in line with the EU's Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules reference values (p. 9). When asked why they stop wearing something: comfort (88.1%), fit (82.2%), visible wear and tear (64.4%). Garments are being retired when they stop working, not when they stop being fashionable.
The irony is worth noting. Mainstream fashion culture has long reinforced the idea that consumers should never be seen in the same outfit twice. Celebrity culture reinforced this. Mainstream and luxury brands destroyed billions of dollars' worth of unsold stock to protect margins. We cannot throw the book at fast fashion while the traditional fashion industry's own record on waste goes unexamined.
Wearing something 50 times until it physically wears out is a product reaching the end of its functional life. The question is not how many times it was worn. It is what happens next. And that brings us back to infrastructure.
Consumer behaviour is also changing. Younger generations buy and return in multiples, resell on Depop and Vinted after a few wears, and increasingly choose second-hand as a first option. But when a young person in a comfortable household treats clothing as disposable, does that reflect the brand or the household income that made discarding it painless? 74.4% of this study's respondents reported earning below their national median income (p. 19). 71.1% bought fewer than 30 items last year.
Should clothing be priced higher to change behaviour? Should the people with the means to discard without consequence change theirs first? Or is the real issue that neither approach works without somewhere for a garment to go at the end?
When a young person in a comfortable household treats clothing as disposable, does that reflect the brand or the household income that made discarding it painless? 74.4% of this study's respondents reported earning below their national median income. 71.1% bought fewer than 30 items last year.
Oxfam found that the richest 10% of the global population accounted for over half of cumulative emissions between 1990 and 2015. I include myself in this. Most of us working in sustainability do.
It is worth asking whether the circularity systems we've built reflect our values and our purchasing power more than the needs of the consumers we are trying to reach. 47% of consumers in this study define sustainable clothing as "durable and long-lasting quality" (p. 10). Fewer than 10% associate it with higher prices. We have built a version of circularity that implicitly requires consumers to pay more. They are telling us they define sustainability as a garment that lasts. Those are not the same thing.
A SHEIN customer and a Patagonia customer can be the same person on different days of the week. 88 million customers is not a niche. If we dismiss them because of where they shop, we dismiss the majority of the market the circularity transition needs to reach.
Engaging with uncomfortable evidence requires giving yourself permission to change your mind. When a climate sceptic refuses to engage with evidence because they distrust the source, we call it closed-mindedness. When we decline to engage with data because of where it was published, what do we call that?
There is a moment when a consumer is finished with a garment. That moment is where circularity lives or dies.
82.6% give clothing to friends or family. 69% donate. 61.7% repair. And only 37.2% recycle, because they don't know where to go or because going there is inconvenient (p. 11, 15–16).
Here is something every retailer with a physical store should notice. SHEIN has effectively published the evidence that its own customers want something it cannot provide. SHEIN doesn't have stores. Every sporting goods retailer, every fashion chain, every department store reading this does. The consumers SHEIN surveyed are already walking through those doors every week. The question is whether the retailers who have the infrastructure recognise what this data is telling them.
The infrastructure exists. The consumer demand exists. What is missing is the connection between the two. Physical collection where the consumer already is, and traceability so that what is collected reaches the right facility. One without the other is incomplete. We have invested heavily in one half.
SHEIN's study ends with a line I did not expect to agree with: "Circularity will scale not through abstract ambition, but through systems that work in everyday life." That is true. It is also something SHEIN has done almost nothing to act on. H&M, on barely half the revenue, has shown what commitment looks like.
But the line is still true. And the data behind it is still real.
So here is my question, and I am asking it of myself as much as anyone. Look at what we have spent the last three years building. Now look at what 15,000 consumers just told us they want. How big is the gap? And did we give ourselves permission to find out?
Sources: SHEIN 2025 Global Circularity Study, pp. 9–19 (15,461 respondents, 21 markets, Nov–Dec 2025). SHEIN 2024 Sustainability and Social Impact Report, pp. 47–68 (June 2025). BCG/ReHubs, Advancing Textile Circularity: Europe's Textile Waste Challenge (March 2026). H&M Group Sustainability Progress Report 2024. European Environment Agency, Briefing 03/2025. Oxfam/SEI, Confronting Carbon Inequality (2020). Simon-Kucher Global Sustainability Study (2024). PEFCR Apparel and Footwear v3.1 (2025). SHEIN 2024 revenue estimate: Financial Times, February 2025.