If you worry about all the waste generated by the annual rush of holiday shopping and gift giving, it’s nothing compared to the mountains of discarded packaging that comes from a single event in China.
On Nov. 11 each year, the world’s biggest consumer market goes into overdrive as e-commerce giants like Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. and JD.com Inc. lure shoppers with huge bargains during the Singles’ Day bonanza. Alibaba reported almost 500 billion yuan ($76 billion) of sales this year, nearly four times U.S. Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending combined. On its Tmall platform, transactions reached a peak when 583,000 orders were made in a single second.
All those purchases meant 675 million packages had to be delivered, a 26% increase from 2019. Online shopping in China generated 9.4 million tons of packaging in 2018, according to Greenpeace, which projects that the amount could rise to 41 million tons by 2025, about the same as all the waste produced by Japan in a year.