It's not just orders that are growing, it's plastic waste
With the continuous development of e-commerce in China, online retail has occupied a very important position in the national economy. Even in the context of the global economic downturn in 2020, China's digital platform enterprises still achieved a super-fast countertrend growth of 56.3%, and the online retail sales of physical goods reached 97.59 billion yuan, accounting for 24.9% of the total social retail sales in that year. In 2022, the online retail sales of physical goods increased to 119.64 billion yuan, accounting for 27.28% of the total social retail sales in the year. This not only shows the strong economic vitality and resilience of online retail, but also shows that online sales business has become a major tool to drive consumption [1].
At the same time, the number of express delivery and takeout orders is growing rapidly every year, followed by a sharp increase in disposable plastic packaging.
In September 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" Action Plan for Plastic Pollution Control, urging and guiding e-commerce, takeout and other platform enterprises and express delivery enterprises to implement the main responsibility and formulate rules for the reduction of disposable plastic products platform. It is clear that not only express delivery companies need to supervise the phenomenon of excessive packaging, but also e-commerce platforms, including takeout platforms, need to assume supervision responsibilities and formulate platform rules to manage stationed merchants.
On May 16, 2023, the Ministry of Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "Administrative Measures for the Use and Reporting of Disposable Plastic Products by Business Operators in the Commercial Field" (later referred to as the "Administrative Measures"). The normative requirements for the use behavior and reporting of single-use plastic products in the commercial field are further refined. At the same time, it is mentioned that e-commerce operators should give priority to using reusable and easy to recycle packaging, and promote the original straight hair of e-commerce express. E-commerce platforms should develop platform rules that encourage operators within the platform to reduce the use of disposable plastic products in express packaging and take-out links.
The understanding and supplement to the "Management Measures" released on June 20, 2023 not only attempts to explain the connotation and extension of the one-time plastic reduction rules of the e-commerce platform, but also provides a template of plastic reduction rules for enterprises to refer to, hoping to assist enterprises to respond to the requirements of the "Management Measures" as soon as possible.
The next question at this time is how to do the so-called "packaging reduction" and according to what criteria?
Commodity packaging reduction principle
In fact, the existing policy documents, such as the "Notice of The General Office of the State Council on Further Strengthening the control of excessive packaging of Commodities" and other documents have put forward the requirements of "promoting packaging enterprises to provide reasonable design" and "packaging reduction in the delivery of commodities", combined with the documents including the "Green Packaging Specification for mail express" [4]. The three principles of product packaging reduction have been preliminarily summarized, which are packaging slimming, optimal design and sustainable packaging principles. According to these three principles, packaging reduction can be achieved in the field of retail e-commerce.
