In 2026, Temu are estimated to produce approximately 2,900,000 metric tonnes (6.4 billion pounds) of waste in total. The figure covers everything from supplier factory offcuts to packaging and discarded products.
Temu publish no waste or emissions data of their own, so the estimate is built from numbers reported by similar ultra-low-cost e-commerce companies and scaled to fit Temu's much larger size.
Despite faster shipping and a sprawling product range that now reaches well beyond clothing, Temu do little to offset the waste they generate.
Their scale alone sets them apart — annual sales roughly double their nearest competitor — and the speed of delivery pushes more parcels onto air freight rather than sea.
By 2026, that adds up to an estimated 2.9 million metric tonnes of waste, placing Temu among the most waste-intensive consumer platforms in the world.
Temu's annual waste totals (2022–2026)
This table shows how Temu's total waste has grown since the company launched in September 2022. The early figures reflect a business that started in a single market (the US) and rapidly expanded to roughly 90 countries within three years.
| Year | Total waste (metric tonnes) | Change from previous year (tonnes) | Change from previous year (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 2,900,000 | +320,000 | +12% |
| 2025 | 2,580,000 | +290,000 | +13% |
| 2024 | 2,290,000 | +1,710,000 | +295% |
| 2023 | 580,000 | +575,000 | +11,500% |
| 2022 | 5,000 | N/A | N/A |
Note: Temu publish no environmental data, so the figures above are estimates triangulated from four reference companies that do — SHEIN, Wish, Alibaba and JD.com. The estimate is then scaled up to reflect how much bigger Temu are on four dimensions: total sales, daily package volume, product mix, and shipping model. Yearly figures are anchored in Temu's reported sales.
What are Temu?
Temu are an ultra-low-cost e-commerce platform that have built their name on selling almost anything you can imagine — clothing, electronics, homewares, toys, tools, beauty products, garden equipment, car parts — at prices that often feel too low to be real.
Temu were launched in September 2022 by PDD Holdings, the Chinese e-commerce group founded by Colin Huang and best known at home for Pinduoduo, China's largest discount marketplace.
The idea behind Temu is essentially the same one that made Pinduoduo successful: cut out the middlemen and connect Chinese factories straight to shoppers, so the products can be priced as cheaply as possible.
Today, almost everything sold on Temu is made, packed and shipped from China, and the platform reaches customers in around 90 countries worldwide.
Temu are one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms in history:
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In 2024, the company generated an estimated $70.8 billion in annual sales (GMV), up from $18 billion in 2023 — roughly a four-fold jump in a single year.
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The Temu app reached more than 416 million monthly active users worldwide by early 2026, and surpassed 1.2 billion cumulative downloads by late 2025, making it one of the most downloaded shopping apps in the world.
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Temu now operate in roughly 90 countries across North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Oceania.
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The platform ships an estimated 2.3 million parcels per day globally, a volume comparable to SHEIN but reached in just three years rather than a decade.
Temu and SHEIN side by side
The closest comparable to Temu is SHEIN — another Chinese-founded, direct-to-consumer platform built on cheap shipping and ultra-low prices.
But SHEIN at least publish some sustainability data, which makes the comparison revealing. On almost every measure that drives waste, Temu sit ahead.
| Category | Temu | SHEIN |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2022 | 2008 |
| Annual sales (2024) | $70.8 billion | $33 billion |
| Daily parcels (estimate) | 2.3 million | 2.0 million |
| Product range | Everything (90+ categories) | Mostly clothing & accessories |
| Average parcel weight | 1 kg | 0.5 kg |
| Estimated annual waste (2026) | 2,900,000 tonnes | 1,228,000 tonnes |
| Score on Remake Fashion Accountability Report 2024 | 0 / 150 | 6 / 150 |
| Publishes sustainability report? | No | Yes (since 2021) |
| Climate target? | None | 25% supply-chain emissions by 2030 |
Note: SHEIN figures from their 2024 sustainability report and Remake's 2024 Fashion Accountability Report. Temu figures are estimates, as Temu publish no first-party data. Both companies scored at or near the bottom of Remake's 2024 ranking of 52 fashion brands.
Where Temu stands out from similar e-commerce companies
When you line Temu up against similar ultra-low-cost e-commerce companies like SHEIN, Wish, Alibaba and JD.com, they consistently land on the higher end of the numbers that actually drive waste: how much is sold, what kind of goods are sold, and how those goods get to people's doors.
Together, this produces a waste footprint that outpaces almost every competitor in the category.
Unlike their main competitors, Temu release no sustainability reports and disclose no waste or emissions data, which means any estimate of their footprint has to be reconstructed from the companies that do publish those numbers — scaled up to match Temu's much larger operation.
Five ways Temu outpace their rivals
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Explosive growth. Temu's sales jumped from $18 billion in 2023 to $70.8 billion in 2024 — a near four-fold increase in a single year. No comparable retailer has grown that fast, and when a business is built on shipping cheap, high-volume goods, waste tends to track growth almost one-for-one.
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More than two million parcels a day. SHEIN ships at roughly the same daily volume, but they have a narrower, lighter product mix. Temu hit around 2.3 million daily parcels in just three years — with very little of the recycling or warehousing infrastructure built up around it.
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A much wider product range. Most fast-fashion rivals stop at clothing. Temu also sell electronics, homewares, toys, tools, garden equipment and car parts. Heavier, more varied catalogues mean heavier parcels, more packaging per order, and more mixed-material waste — plastics, metals, batteries, foam — once the products are thrown out.
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Fast shipping, individually packed. Temu's delivery promises are tighter than most cross-border competitors, which pushes a larger share of parcels onto planes instead of consolidated sea freight. Each parcel travels alone — and each one needs its own packaging.
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Sales of $70.8 billion in 2024. More sales simply means more physical goods moving through the system. Temu's revenue is now more than twice SHEIN's and is growing faster, in percentage terms, than Alibaba or JD.com.
Together, these five factors are exactly why Temu's estimated waste footprint sits so much higher than their peers.
The 2026 estimate of roughly 2.9 million metric tonnes is built by taking the reported waste figures of SHEIN, Alibaba and JD.com and scaling them up to reflect Temu's larger sales, heavier parcels, wider product mix and faster shipping model.
Temu's parcel volume from 2022 to 2026
Parcels are the single biggest driver of Temu's waste footprint.
Every order leaving a Chinese warehouse adds packaging, transport emissions, and — eventually — a discarded product to the total. The faster the parcel count grows, the faster the waste pile grows with it.
And Temu's parcel count has climbed faster than almost any e-commerce company in history.
| Year | Parcels per day | Parcels per year | Yearly growth | Growth pattern |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 2,300,000 | 840 million | +9% | Slowing |
| 2025 | 2,100,000 | 770 million | +17% | Slowing |
| 2024 | 1,800,000 | 660 million | +200% | Explosive |
| 2023 | 600,000 | 220 million | +4,300% | Explosive |
| 2022 | 50,000 | 5 million | — | Launch |
Note: Temu do not publish parcel data. The figures are estimates based on tracking by ShipMatrix, the US Congressional Select Committee, and the European Economic and Social Committee. The 2022 number only covers September to December, when Temu had just launched in the US. The 2025 slowdown reflects the end of the US "de minimis" import exemption in May 2025.
How a single US law reshaped Temu overnight in 2025
For years, Temu's US business relied on a customs rule called the de minimis exemption — any package valued under $800 could enter the country duty-free, with almost no paperwork or inspection.
By shipping orders as small individual parcels straight from Chinese factories, Temu used this rule as the legal foundation for their low-cost US model.
That ended in May 2025, when the US scrapped the exemption for shipments from China and Hong Kong. Parcels became subject to full import duties overnight, prices rose, and Temu's US growth slowed sharply.
The company responded by opening US warehouses and pushing harder into Europe, Latin America and Asia — where similar exemptions still apply, for now.
What Temu clothes are really made of
Temu's products aren't just shipped in plastic — they're often made of it. In late 2025, the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth Cyprus, together with AK Upper Austria, lab-tested 20 ultra-fast-fashion items from Temu and SHEIN.
The results showed why these products contribute so heavily to microplastic pollution and chemical waste long after they reach customers' homes.
| Finding from the Friends of the Earth investigation | Result |
|---|---|
| Share of tested items made from PVC, polyester, spandex or EVA | 85% |
| Items in which PFAS ("forever chemicals") were detected | 4 of 20 |
| Highest PFAS limit exceedance (Temu women's windbreaker) | 4,154 times the legal limit |
| Plasticisers found in tested Temu and SHEIN shoes | Significant amounts |
| Lead found in tested SHEIN shoes | Yes |
| Global textile recycling rate (context) | 1% |
| Global textile waste produced each year (context) | 92 million tonnes |
Note: Test results from the joint Friends of the Earth Cyprus and AK Upper Austria investigation, published November 2025. Global textile figures from UNEP and Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2024.
The investigation also flagged that polyester garments — which make up the bulk of Temu's clothing range — keep shedding microplastics for over 100 years before they fully degrade.
Every wash releases hundreds of thousands of microfibres into waterways, meaning the environmental cost of each Temu garment continues long after it's worn out and thrown away.
Temu's estimated CO₂ emissions from 2023 to 2026
Air freight is the single biggest reason Temu's carbon footprint is so high. Most of the company's parcels travel from China directly to consumers by plane — which produces 20 to 30 times more CO₂ per tonne-kilometre than sea freight.
The table below shows estimated emissions across all of Temu's operations, including manufacturing, transport, and warehousing.
| Year | CO₂e emissions (metric tonnes) | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 5,500,000 | +12% |
| 2025 | 4,900,000 | +14% |
| 2024 | 4,300,000 | +291% |
| 2023 | 1,100,000 | — |
Note: Temu publish no emissions data. The 2024 figure comes from environmental research outlet Reppatch, based on Temu's parcel volume and the average CO₂ output of an air-freight shipment from China. 2023 is scaled down to match Temu's smaller size that year, and 2025–2026 assume continued growth at the company's reported pace.
What Temu say about their own environmental impact
Temu don't share much about their environmental impact — in fact, almost nothing. The closest thing to a sustainability page on their website is dedicated to one initiative: tree planting.
It's a single project, presented as if it tells the full story of a global business shipping more than two million parcels a day.
Their tree-planting program
Since July 2023, Temu have partnered with Trees for the Future, a non-profit that works with smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa to plant trees through regenerative agriculture.
The program is opt-in: at checkout, shoppers can choose to "plant a tree" with their order, and Temu fund the planting through their partner.
As of 2026, the company claims more than 25 million trees have been funded through the partnership — a figure that has roughly doubled each year since the program launched.
Temu Express
Temu Express is the company's faster shipping option, costing around $12.90 (free on orders over $129) and delivering in 5–10 business days rather than the standard 8–25.
Since 2024, a growing share of Temu Express orders has been fulfilled from local warehouses in the US, UK and Europe, replacing long-haul air freight from China with shorter regional delivery routes.
Temu have publicly stated that they aim to fulfil up to 80% of European orders through local warehouses, with the service already running in Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria.
The shift does cut emissions per parcel — but Temu have not published any data on how much, or what proportion of their total orders now ship this way.
A small green corner of a very big business
Both initiatives are real, but they only address small corners of a very large business.
Temu ship roughly 840 million parcels a year, and the company does not publish an annual climate report, an emissions breakdown, a packaging tonnage figure, or a recycling rate.
Ratings agency Good On You has described the tree program as "unlikely to have any significant impact" and flagged it as potential greenwashing — pointing out that Temu use tree-planting as their public sustainability story while staying silent on the much larger sources of their waste, emissions and product disposal.
