Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    TO save money, my wife and I purchased many necessities from Taobao.com, China’s biggest C2C shopping website, during the Singles’ Day shopping carnival. Starting in late November, we began receiving packages, and we were very delighted because we could add all the new stuff to our new home. As we began to tear open packages, however, we found that many of the goods were overwrapped — sealing tape, exterior yellow strawboard boxes, plastic film, buffering fillings and so on.

    When I went to throw away all the packing materials, I noticed that many of the trash cans in my community were already filled with discarded wrapping materials.

    China has hundreds of millions of online buyers and they must be discarding wrapping materials every day. This is causing waste and pollution that cannot be ignored.

    The latest data released by the State Post Bureau substantiates my worries — China had over 14 billion express packages delivered last year, and that number will skyrocket to 20 billion this year. A great number of trashed packages will bring about the severe problem of resource waste and pollution if they are not properly processed. Experts estimate that 14 billion packages could produce 2.8 million tons of waste, covering an area of 200,000 football fields. The length of sealing tape consumed yearly could circle the earth 300 times.

    In addition, it can take 100 years for sealing tape and other plastic packaging, which contains polyvinyl chloride (PVC), to decompose in a landfill. Once this plastic decomposes into small molecules, it can hurt human beings via the food chain. Worse still, if plastic materials are incinerated, virulent dioxins can be produced immediately.

    Packaging materials of course can also be recycled in China like in developed countries. For example, 1 ton of used strawboard can be recycled to produce 0.8 tons of new strawboard, which means saving 17 trees, 1.2 tons of coal or 600 kilowatts of electricity. Nevertheless, the current waste recycling system in China, which is completely market-oriented, can’t handle the huge amount of delivery waste.

    The recycling system, mainly located in urban areas, consists of rubbish collectors and recycling stations. Thanks to low prices for selling collected delivery waste and the complexity of sorting it, most rubbish collectors don’t recycle packaging materials. Meanwhile, rural areas, regarded as a blue ocean market by e-commerce companies, have no recycling services at all.

    In most developed countries, recycling companies, if not all, are partially supported by their governments in the form of tax cut. The governments also provide land for wastes recycling, making sure that the recycling companies are profitable and that there are enough collecting and recycling companies. However, more and more private recycling stations in China are pulling out of the market because of declining profits and high cost because of the lack of government support.

    From 2009 to 2015, the number of recycling stations in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, has decreased from 1,050 to over 600, and the number of rubbish collectors shrank from over 12,000 to nearly 4,000, according to a news report by Xinhua News Agency.

    With the rapid development of e-commerce in China, the volume of delivery packages will continue to increase in the coming years, as will package waste. Given that the issue of delivery package waste is not a matter that can be solved easily, the government, express delivery companies, e-commerce companies and individuals should share the responsibility.

    Specifically, the government should offer some financial support to recycling companies and attract more people to the industry; e-commerce companies and delivery companies should simplify their packaging and use environment-friendly packing materials; and individuals should sort their own garbage. Let’s be responsible online shoppers.

    (The author is a News Desk editor with China Radio International.)