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Singles' Day (11.11)
AbacusCulture

The world’s biggest shopping event has a massive waste problem

Singles’ Day is an ecommerce extravaganza that’s far bigger than Black Friday, but it generates millions of tons of packaging waste

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Workers prepare packages for delivery during Singles’ Day in 2016. (Picture: AFP)
Karen Chiu
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Dwarfing Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, Singles’ Day is the world’s biggest shopping event, generating tens of billions of dollars in sales each year. But while the astounding amount of shopping takes place in the digital realm, the goods that are bought are physical — and so is the plastic waste that comes with them.

Singles’ Day, the shopping event that makes Black Friday look like a yard sale

On last year’s Singles’ Day, ecommerce portals in China generated more than 1.3 billion shipping orders, according to the State Post Bureau — up by about 25% from the previous year. That’s equivalent to every single American putting in four orders in one day.
And every single shipped item is swathed in plastic wrappers, tape and cardboard boxes. Together, they made up some 9.4 million tons of packaging materials, weighing the equivalent of 130 million adults, according to a new report from Greenpeace and Break Free From Plastic China.
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The problem is poised to get worse, as ecommerce giants like Alibaba, JD.com and Pinduoduo seek to grow by turning to rural areas in search of millions of untapped customers.

Pinduoduo: China’s hottest online shopping startup

By Monday morning, just nine hours into Singles’ Day 2019, Alibaba already raked in over US$22 billion in sales — two-thirds of last year’s final tally. Smartphone giant Huawei said it only took a minute to beat its whole-day November 1st sales last year. Rival Apple took 10 minutes to beat its full-day sales on Alibaba’s Tmall last year by seven times.
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(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

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