Advanced Search

The story appears on

Page A8

November 15, 2021

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Nation

Singles Day shopping gala is a ‘battlefield’ for carbon reduction

Source: Xinhua | 00:05 UTC+8 November 15, 2021 | Print Edition

A few days after placing the order, Wang Maiqi received the pick-up notice from a courier station in her neighborhood. She then habitually put the parcel box in a recycling counter at the station and got a virtual egg on a mobile app.

“After collecting four eggs, the platform delivers real eggs to my home free of charge,” said Wang, a resident of Taiyuan City, north China’s Shanxi Province. “It’s a win-win situation with the old packaging recycled and consumers getting tangible benefits.”

In the annual Singles Day shopping bonanza this year, a total of 60,000 courier stations under Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao Network sent out 7.5 million eggs for consumers recycling the parcel boxes.

The shopping festival, first initiated by Alibaba on November 11, 2009, is now getting greener, becoming a new “battlefield” where companies are trying to make a difference amid the country’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Alibaba’s e-commerce platform Tmall issued 100 million yuan (US$15.6 million) of green vouchers this year, encouraging consumers to buy energy-efficient home appliances and products with “green” certificates to support the country’s carbon-reduction goals.

E-commerce giant JD.com has also joined the “low carbon” campaign, developing recyclable packaging, deploying new-energy cargo vans, and adopting photovoltaic power generation in warehousing.

Among all the commodities at JD.com during this year’s festival, more than 150 million were green products. The firm said the energy-efficient air conditioners, refrigerators, and televisions that customers bought from JD.com last year could help reduce carbon emissions by nearly 2 million tons annually.

After China announced it would strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, the ambitious targets were lauded by all sectors of society. According to the 14th Five Year Plan for E-commerce Development, e-commerce enterprises should actively adapt to green and low-carbon development requirements, set up a green development vision, fulfill environmental protection responsibilities, and promote green innovation.

The “green whirlwind” of energy conservation and emission reduction has blown up in the whole chain of e-commerce logistics.

Chinese courier giant ZTO Express launched more than 11 million recycling transfer bags, replacing about 1.16 billion disposable woven bags — equivalent to a reduction of about 104,000 tons of garbage.

“The carbon emissions per kilogram generated by a single ZTO parcel has decreased from 0.091 in 2018 to 0.061 in 2020, showing a downward trend for three consecutive years,” said Zhao Xiaolong, general manager of the management center of the ZTO Express Shanxi branch.

Nation


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend