(LI MIN / CHINA DAILY)

The express delivery service is booming, adding to the vitality of consumption. Yet less than 5 percent of the cardboard boxes used in express delivery services are reused and nearly all plastic packaging ends up in landfills or somehow finds its way to the seas.

These results of a survey conducted last year, covering 37 universities and residential communities, as well as four e-commerce companies in 18 provinces or cities from July to September, show the magnitude of the environmental costs of the booming express delivery business in the country.

Take for example the Singles Day (Nov 11) shopping gala last year. The Tmall e-commerce site alone received 1.3 billion orders in a single day, up 30 percent year-on-year, generating an estimated 26 billion cartons.

... express delivery businesses, government authorities and the public have to make greater efforts to reduce the usage of single-use plastics ... to curb plastic pollution and address the overall garbage problem, in order to save the planet

Many environmentally conscious buyers have complained that retailers tend to pack goods in unnecessarily large cartons or plastic bags to prevent them from being damaged. One such buyer in Kunming, Yunnan province, said that she bought a pan and a little spoon at a store on Taobao but to her surprise they were delivered in separate cartons. Was there a need to wrap the little spoon in a separate box? Wasn't it an unnecessary generation of garbage?

In 2018, the delivery packaging services generated 13 million tons of carbon emissions, which would take 710 million trees to neutralize. And if strict eco-friendly policies are not enacted and enforced, emissions will more than quadruple in the next five years.

Delivery packaging materials are generally of two types, paper and plastic, with paper-made boxes making up 44 percent of all packaging and plastic bags 34 percent. The rest comprises foam boxes, woven bags and other materials.

The express delivery sector has grown on average 41.5 percent a year in the past three decades with a corresponding increase in the amount of packaging waste.

That about 1.4 billion yuan (US$200 million) was spent in 2018 to incinerate or bury delivery packaging waste should give us a fair idea about the type of environmental problem we are facing. Worse, the figure could increase by more than three times in the next five years if recycling rates remain the same.

Greenpeace East Asia, Break Free from Plastic China and All-China Environmental Federation jointly released a report on Nov 11 on the characteristics and management of express delivery packaging waste in China, which said the express delivery service has grown at an average of 50 percent a year between 2012 and 2016, although its growth has slowed since 2017. Still, 50.7 billion pieces of goods were delivered in 2018 despite the growth declining to 26.6 percent.

Although express delivery companies have made efforts to improve the situation by taking measures to reduce packaging waste, they failed to realize their expectations, for instance, for the Singles Day shopping extravaganza last year.

Reports said 97 percent of the delivery companies have started using digital waybills, and thinner packaging tapes, with some leading e-commerce platforms such as JD and Suning using "recycling" boxes. Yet the use of such boxes has been far below expectations.

Also, to reduce waste, courier companies such as Cainiao, Yunda and Sto came together during the Nov 11 shopping gala and set up facilities where consumers could leave cartons for recycling. But the arrangement didn't yield the desired results because many people had not heard of them.

True, modern life is unthinkable without plastics. But the environmental and therefore human cost plastic is extracting on the planet could lead the world toward disaster. For instance, the global production of plastic trash is estimated to hit 13 billion tons in 2050, double that of 2015.

After being used for a short time, 12 minutes on average for each of the 5 trillion single-use plastic bags consumed each year, most of the plastic products are dumped. And frighteningly enough, these plastic products break into granules and enter the food chains of animals and, as research shows, ultimately consumed by humans.

The report calls for more mandatory policies to prompt market players to reduce packaging materials and increase the rates of recycling and reuse, as well as establishing a green certification system for the industry.

China released a document on Sunday to curb plastic pollution, as the global production of plastic products has increased from 400 tons 50 years ago to 70 million tons in about half a century, yet only 20-30 million tons of these plastics are recycled.

Laws and rules are necessary. But more importantly, express delivery businesses, government authorities and the public have to make greater efforts to reduce the usage of single-use plastics, including those used by delivery companies, to curb plastic pollution and address the overall garbage problem, in order to save the planet.

The authors are writers with China Daily.