• Retailers are waiting for recycling regulations instead of taking initiative, campaigners say
• Draft packaging standards were published last month, and e-commerce companies say they have waste reduction plans in operation

The amount of waste accumulated by China’s e-commerce and express delivery sectors could more than quadruple by 2025 unless action is taken to reduce it, environmental groups said on Monday as the online shopping spree known as Singles’ Day set sales records.

The volume of packaging material used by the sectors was 9.4 million tonnes last year, and was on course to reach 41.3 million tonnes by 2025 if they kept up the rate of increase, Greenpeace and other non-government bodies said in a report.

“The e-commerce giants have barely offered even superficial responses,” Tang Damin, a plastics campaigner with Greenpeace in Beijing, said. “They’re biding their time for regulations to come out.”

Sales hit 84 billion yuan (US$12 billion) in the first hour of the Singles’ Day annual event, up 22 per cent from last year, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group said.

As e-commerce companies work to extend their reach into rural regions, 1.88 billion packages were delivered from November 11 to November 16 last year, an annual increase of almost 26 per cent, the State Post Bureau said.

There was no official figure for the amount of waste generated, but Greenpeace estimated that it exceeded 250,000 tonnes.

China had tried to turn recycling into a profitable business as space for landfills became scarcer and environmental concern about plastic waste grew, but it had yet to tackle e-commerce waste, recycling about 5 per cent of plastic packaging, the green groups said in their report.

Last month, China’s market regulator published draft packaging standards that will restrict courier firms to a list of approved recyclable material.

In October, Alibaba, the owner of the South China Morning Post, said it was now “greener than ever” and had provided incentives for customers to recycle, adding that its delivery subsidiary Cainiao would mark November 20 as a special cardboard recycling day.

Another online retailer, JD.com, also announced it had cut back on adhesive tape and paper used at its warehouses and had adopted more recyclable materials.

China is building 100 “comprehensive resource utilisation bases”, creating pilot “zero-waste” cities and pushing for mandatory trash sorting rules in major hubs, such as its commercial capital of Shanghai.

“We cannot say China is not recycling,” said Antoine Grange, chief executive for recycling at waste management company Suez Asia, who estimated such rates could be as high as 25 per cent overall.

“One point that is more difficult in China is traceability, and the lack of infrastructure to separate waste.”