A Swedish newspaper uncovers the dystopian world of Temu and Shein returns – with photographs
Colin Huang, a 44-year-old former Google engineer and graduate of the University of Wisconsin is one of China’s richest men. PDD, the company he founded in 2015, is registered in the Cayman Islands, headquartered in Dublin, and listed on the US stock market. Its total value at the date of publication of our Dispatch #3 was a shade under $170 billion – a little less than Uber, considerably more than Boeing.
Temu, the e-commerce marketplace which has been at the root of PDD’s success, connects consumers around the world with Chinese manufacturers of everything from make-up bags marked with the words ‘All my fucking meds’ to extra-long rubber gloves for cleaning aquariums, to brightly coloured instant print cameras marketed to children. Its slogan on the Apple app store is: Shop like a billionaire.
One of Temu’s attractions – apart from low prices, and its highly addictive app – is its free shipping and returns policy. But, if you do return stuff, where does it end up?
Swedish journalists Staffan Lindberg and Magnus Wennman decided to find out for Aftonbladet, running two parallel investigations over the course of 2024: one into returns from the TikTok fuelled fast-fashion platform Shein, and a second into returns from Temu, hiding AirTags in randomly purchased from products from both platforms, and then returning them, to see where they would go.
It’s a growing issue. The logistics around e-commerce have exploded across Europe. 2.3 billion packages enter the EU every year duty-free. “In 2024”, Aftonbladet notes, “Swedes ordered some five million small packages from China, a sharp increase on the previous year”. It is inevitable that a proportion are returned. Aftonbladet’s investigation throws serious doubt on the promises made in terms of where those returns go, and the environmental impact in the process.
In the case of the items purchased and returned by Lindberg and Wennman, the returns process for both Shein and Temu begins with the same shipping company in Malmö in southern Sweden with appalling approval ratings, no email and a telephone number which can’t be reached (but which Swedish search engine hitta.se warns may be associated with fraud).
After that, the stories diverge. The 4-part Shein story takes Lindberg and Wennman through a bewildering network of Polish transshipment centres staffed by Ukrainian refugees, to an Italian company specialising in unsold returns which sends a couple of items to New York.
Other items, however, end up much further away: in the hands of smugglers in Bolivia or in the Atacama desert in Chile, where clothes are regularly dumped and burned (Wennman’s beautiful and disturbing photographs of this place are available here). A previous investigation conducted by the two journalists into H&M returns took them as far as Ghana. “We thought it couldn’t get any worse”, they write: “we were wrong.”
After Malmö, the Temu returns tracked by Lindberg and Wennman follow a different route. Initially they are shipped via Rotterdam (April) and Malaysia (May) back to China (June). The distances covered by ship are enormous. Aftonbladet notes the environmental consequences: “our shopping is driving global warming.”
By September, some of the returned Temu items have left China again and arrived in Iraq. By October they are in Baghdad, at a market where goods first purchased in Europe are prized as being higher quality than those sent direct from China. A local Iraqi journalist Zhyar Rawf tracks down the Nintendo case and the lip balm set originally purchased by Lindberg and Wennman in February to an address near one of Shia Islam’s most holy sites.
Back in Sweden, the journalists note, the same lip balm set is being touted on the Temu app as a bestseller, and being offered at a discount.
[Both Shein and Temu responded to Aftonbladet’s investigation by telling the newspaper that their business model was inherently more environmentally efficient because their on-demand structure reduced the likelihood of unsold inventory, and therefore waste. These responses are recorded in a footnote to both stories here and here.]
Full articles by Staffan Lindberg and Magnus Wennman available here (for the Shein series) and here (for the Temu piece).
Vad händer med Shein-returerna?, Aftonbladet, 16 January 2025
Vem vill ha våra Temu-prylar?, Aftonbladet, 25 January 2025
Aftonbladet is one of Sweden’s leading daily newspapers.
