Singles’ Day sales are no cause for optimism – when Chinese consumerism wakes, it may trash the world

The good news is that China’s Singles’ Day numbers show it is boosting domestic demand, becoming less reliant on exports
The bad news? If China, and India, replicate the West’s consumption and waste habits, we’ll have an environmental crisis

David Dodwell

Published: 6:00am, 16 Nov 2019

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For those of us weighed down by gloom on all sides – with lunatic violence in Hong Kong, Chile and Spain, with British election campaigns pointing relentlessly towards Brexit, with impeachment revelations in the US, and forest fires ablaze across New South Wales – there was rare comfort in last Monday’s extravagant Singles' Day shopping bonanza.

Here was clear evidence of ebullient optimism among ordinary folk across the length of China, and of China successfully shifting away from its reliance on exports and instead building household consumption as a key driver of economic growth. With so much talk of imminent recession, here was hope.

As Taylor Swift led a long list of international stars in a glittering show to celebrate Alibaba’s spending party, it was mesmerising to watch the “spendometer” whirr giddily at the bottom of the screen as they marked US$1 billion in sales in just 68 seconds, US$10 billion in half an hour, eventually topping 268 billion yuan, or US$38.4 billion, over the full 24 hours. That was 26 per cent up on 2018.

Here were half a billion people buying more than a billion items across the e-commerce network of Alibaba (also the parent company of the South China Morning Post), ranging from perfume and make-up to cars and farm equipment.

Add to this the US$29 billion or so spent across JD.com’s copycat extravaganza, and significant billions spent across the e-commerce platform of upstart Pinduoduo, and you have nothing less than a consumer orgy.

Compare this with the five-day Black Friday spend-fest in the US, which last year clocked just under US$25 billion in sales, and Cyber Monday that clocked less than US$8 billion, and you glimpse the awesome consumer power that can be driven by an emergent China that today still has per capita income not much more than a quarter of US per capita income.

Imagine the consumer force to be generated as household incomes in China move close to the levels of rich Western economies.

But here’s where a nagging anxiety seeps in, driven by the distant memory of Annie Leonard’s epic 21-minute documentary released at the end of 2007, The Story of Stuff .

That was before the first ever Singles' Day consumer festival. Leonard walked us crisply down the path of where our hyperconsumptive obsession leads, starkly showing the exhaustion of global resources and the horrendous environmental harm of our addiction to “stuff”.

By today, increasingly rigorous research worldwide has quantified the unsustainable consequences of our relentless pursuit of growth – the depletion of resources, the environmental degradation and the mounting creation of waste, in particular of plastics. And yet here we are still celebrating China’s exuberant orgy of Singles' Day hyperconsumption, and holding it up as a pointer towards what a richer China will look like.

How will the world cope with waste when the rest catches up with the West?

The simple dreadful reality is that if Chinese families – or Indian families behind them – ever come close to consuming like we in the self-indulgent rich West have consumed for the past two generations, then our planet is likely to be trashed, literally.

As Fred Gale at the University of Tasmania has elaborated vividly in a Tedx talk, humans worldwide at present need about two hectares per capita worldwide to sustain our lifestyles – but the average in the US, Canada, the EU and Australia is six hectares per capita, with the richest 10 per cent in these countries needing about 12 hectares.

Multiply the world population by 12 hectares per capita and you need three earths to support our lifestyles. Our aspiring middle class consumers in China or India will either have to generate “stuff” immeasurably more efficiently than we do today, or learn to live with a lot less “stuff”.

We are reminded that we use about 15,000 litres of water to make a single pair of jeans, but then dispose of more than 90 per cent of the products we buy within six months of purchase. According to the Huffington Post, the average American will toss out 81 pounds of clothing this year – which amounts to 26 billion pounds of textiles and clothes ending up in landfills every year.

Note that according to the World Bank’s 2018 “What a Waste” report, the average American throws away 2.24kg (4.93lbs) of waste every day, compared to a global average of 0.74kg (1.63lbs), 0.43kg (0.94lbs) in China and 0.57kg (1.26lbs) in India (Hong Kong is, embarrassingly, up there with the US at 2.14kg, or 4.71lbs, per day).

Shanghai shows city way in war on waste

Imagine the world’s waste crisis if Chinese or Indian families were disposing of trash on the same scale as the average American. Note also that until the end of last year, the US was “exporting” its waste problem by dispatching 4,000 shipping containers of waste every day to be dealt with by China, with Japan and Germany not far behind.

While we celebrated the flamboyant hyperconsumption of Singles' Day, party-poopers at Greenpeace noted that packaging for the 1.88 million items delivered from November 11-16 last year amounted to 250,000 tonnes.

Packaging materials used in the “e-fulfilment” logistics delivering e-commerce goods at high speed to e-consumers amounted to 9.4 million tonnes last year, said Greenpeace, adding that this is on course to reach 41.3 million tonnes by 2025.

So our one bright spot last week turns out to be not so welcome after all, and we seem as far as ever from acknowledging the fundamental unsustainability of our current extravagant consumption habits.

We are light-years away from Lauren Singer, founder of The Simply Co, and author of the blog Trash is for Tossers, who boasts of running a zero-waste home, generating a single glass jar full of waste last year by eliminating all food packaging, composting her food waste, buying clothes from second-hand stores and buying less of everything.

But if we all lived like Singer, then Singles' Day would be a dreadfully dreary event, and China’s hopes to restore strong economic growth on the back of the consumer power of its rising middle classes would be pipe dreams.

Yet one way or another, sooner rather than later, we are all going to have to learn from Singer. As Professor Dan O’Neill at the University of Leeds pungently noted, we are going to need to recognise “the madness of more” versus “the wisdom of enough”.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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