Excessive Packaging Under the Microscope: What the 618 Delivery Surge Means for Green Packaging

When this year's 618 promotional campaign overlapped with the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, demand for online shopping, festive spending and gifts for relatives and friends surged at the same time. Yet the ceaseless stream of courier deliveries left something else behind: a sharp rise in packaging waste building up at residential garbage storage points. Ordering has never been easier, but the pollution and waste caused by over-packaged goods keep recurring. Making green consumption a reality means confronting excessive packaging head-on — packaging should stay moderate and fit for purpose, and extravagance and display should be rejected.

There was a time when Chinese products paid little attention to packaging. The belief that good wine needs no bush meant presentation was treated as secondary, and that cost the country dearly in product sales, exports in particular. Decades of reform and opening up changed the picture: as the economy advanced by leaps and bounds, the domestic packaging industry made a qualitative leap of its own. According to the 2022 Report on the Operation of China's Packaging Industry, China had 9,860 packaging enterprises above designated size in 2022, and those enterprises posted combined operating revenue of RMB 1.229 trillion. Chinese goods now match world-class standards not only in quality but also in packaging.

Against that vigorous growth, however, one problem persists: excessive packaging remains prominent in the circulation and sale of goods. Eager to push up prices and project a premium image, some merchants overspend on packaging, favouring appearance over content and piling on layer after layer in lavish, flashy style that does not match what is inside, adding further to environmental pollution and wasted resources. Xiamen's recent special governance campaign against over-packaged tea exposed several telling cases, among them 10 grams of tea sold in packaging with a volume of 5,000 cubic centimetres, and two small packets of cinnamon tea priced above RMB 2,000 whose packaging void ratio exceeded the standard by 95%.

What does 5,000 cubic centimetres mean? It is the volume of ten 500 ml bottles of bottled water — space devoted to just 10 grams of tea. That consumes large amounts of extra packaging and filling material, and also occupies far more room than necessary in transit, wasting both logistics space and energy. The outer packaging consumers eventually discard then adds to the burden of sanitation collection and garbage disposal, making the resource waste astonishing across the product life cycle.

China's leadership attaches great importance to this issue. The Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 calls for accelerating the green transformation of development models, building a resource-recycling system and advancing the reduction, standardisation and recycling of express packaging. In its report on the implementation of the 2022 national economic and social development plan and the draft 2023 plan, the National Development and Reform Commission advocates vigorously promoting green consumption and tackling excessive packaging of goods. Consumers take the same view: according to the Research on the Issue of Excessive Commodity Packaging and Consumer Perception Survey Report recently released by the China Consumers Association, 80.7% of consumers oppose excessive packaging, while 51.4% believe the problem is widespread.

Commodity packaging today is a highly specialised, large-scale industry serving a highly developed commercial circulation system. Provided packaging is scientific, safe and necessary, cutting back what is excessive or redundant is not a job for the packaging industry alone — it is a shift in values that merchants and consumers alike must make. Once brands stop using packaging to gild their products, and shoppers stop rewarding flashy exteriors, slimming down over-packaging will follow naturally. Supervision and inspection of excessive packaging in the market remain indispensable. Only when all sides work together can packaging shed its flashiness and return to its essential role.

For a country of China's population size, the demand for resources is enormous. As green development takes ever deeper root, using limited resources wisely, raising efficiency and reducing pollution and waste benefit both sustainable development and energy and resource conservation. Let us work together to leave excessive packaging behind and support greener growth.

— Reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original article: http://news.pack.cn/show-379410.html