Weekend Long Read: Who’s Responsible for China’s Growing Mountain of Plastic Waste?

China’s e-commerce and food delivery industries have produced a vast amount of “white pollution.”

The country’s express delivery business has grown considerably in the past decade amid the rapid development of e-commerce. In 2020, the business handled 83.4 billion deliveries, while consuming 155 billion tons of packaging materials. This has resulted in a total of 1.4 million tons of plastic waste, of which the bulk — about 1.1 million tons — came from the e-commerce-linked express delivery business.