How the coronavirus is delivering more rubbish problems in China

For weeks, streets were empty and shops closed in cities across China as millions of people stayed in to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

But for Xu Yuanhong, 35, who runs a garbage-sorting company in Beijing, business has never been better.

“When people stay home, they have more time on their hands to produce more rubbish,” said Xu, whose company Ai Fenlei processes about 800 tonnes of rubbish every day.

Since February, when the Chinese capital went into partial lockdown, Ai Fenlei has had to handle 20 per cent more garbage each day than usual, with much of the extra waste packaging from deliveries.

With the temporary closure of bricks-and-mortar stores and consumers confined to their homes, the coronavirus pandemic has helped cement courier services as an indispensable part of urban living.

But it has also added to the sea of cartons, plastic containers and bubble wrap already created by China’s US$100 billion delivery economy.

The reliance on packaging could have far-reaching environmental and social impacts.

Second nature

The delivery business has grown exponentially in China over the past two decades.

Between 2000 and 2018, the annual volume of packages rose from 22,600 tonnes to more than 9.4 million tonnes, according to an analysis by Greenpeace.

In 2019, China’s couriers delivered 60 billion parcels, up a quarter from the previous year, according to the State Post Bureau, the country’s postal regulator.

Plastic makes up about a tenth of the packaging materials used, Greenpeace said. The vast majority of the non-biodegradable waste – about 850,000 tonnes – ends up in a landfill or an incinerator every year.

“Imagine the weight of 12 million adults – that’s roughly the amount of plastic packaging the Chinese delivery business used in 2018 alone,” said Tang Damin, a plastics campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia.

The explosion of plastic packaging waste in China should be a wake-up call for other countries, he said.

“The garbage woes in China are just a start. Other countries will see their packaging waste explode in the same fashion if their waste systems can’t catch up with the fast growing e-commerce sectors.”

For the 639 million online shoppers in China, ordering online was second nature even before the pandemic.

“I order things online a lot – a package of something every other day and groceries every week,” said Zhang Yujian, a finance worker in Shanghai who worked from home for February and much of March to stop the spread of the virus.

The pandemic has introduced new items to her shopping trolley: bottles of alcohol disinfectant and boxes of face masks. With just a few taps on her phone, Zhang can get them delivered to three addresses: hers, her parents’ and her in-laws’.

Consumers like Zhang are a reason why China’s courier businesses have emerged as rare winners from the pandemic, reporting a 3 per cent growth in revenue despite an 8 per cent fall in overall consumer spending.

Filled to the brim

The growing appetite for delivered goods and the resulting rubbish has put pressure on China’s waste disposal infrastructure, which is buckling under the weight of the country’s expanding middle-class consumers.

China’s landfills, which handle a little more than half of the country’s waste, are filling up sooner than expected. The biggest landfill site, in the northwestern city of Xian, was closed in November after it reached its limit more than two decades ahead of schedule.

As a result, China has increasingly relied on incinerators to process rubbish and generate electricity. In 2018, these facilities burned 45 per cent of China’s 228 million tonnes of urban waste, compared with 15 per cent a decade earlier.

But this creates air pollution and social discontent. In 2019, riot police were deployed in the central city of Wuhan to quell mass protests triggered by plans to build such a plant.

A year earlier, China sought to ease its garbage crisis by banning imports of a wide range of waste, disrupting the flow of plastic scrap across the globe. Exports of rubbish from rich countries shifted from China to its neighbours, with garbage also piling up in source origin countries, including the United States.

Beijing said that by the end of this year the country would no longer accept any imported solid waste.

The plan to halt import of foreign rubbish is driven by Chinese President Xi Jinping himself, according to Liu Youbin, a spokesman from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Sorting it out

At home, the Chinese authorities started a nationwide campaign last year to enforce sorting and recycling in first-tier cities such as Shanghai.

But some environmental watchdogs say those measures do not go far enough.

“Waste generated by deliveries is not just the consumer’s responsibility. It should be a responsibility shared by all parties involved – manufacturers, the government, and the people,” said Chen Liwen, founder of Zero Waste Villages, a non-governmental organisation promoting waste reduction in rural China.

“The end goal needs to be reducing waste, it can’t just be recycling. Because all recyclables will eventually turn into rubbish, adding to the amount of waste that would need to be buried or burned.”

Compared to more developed economies, the large part of China is still playing catch up in terms of recycling and reusing plastic containers.

The 2019 Greenpeace report said China recycled less than 5 per cent of its 850,000 tonnes of plastic packaging in 2018 and the rest ended up buried or burned.

In comparison, 27 countries in the European Union recycled about 42 per cent of the plastic packaging waste they produced in 2017, according to Eurostat, the bloc’s statistics office.

Plastics take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose, in the meantime threatening marine wildlife and contaminating food and water sources.

A 2017 study by The Ocean Cleanup foundation and published by the journal Nature Communications estimated that about 13-28 per cent of all sea plastic pollution flowed in from the Yangtze River, the result of economic development and poor waste management.

Chen, of Zero Waste Villages, said China should introduce laws to force factories to replace disposable items and containers with greener alternatives.

Zhang, the financial worker in Shanghai, said she welcomed the city’s move to enforce sorting of their rubbish, saying it made her aware of the amount of waste that came with her purchases.

“We ordered fewer deliveries because it was so much work to sort the rubbish,” she said.

But she conceded that, “now that we are used to the sorting, our delivery orders are back to normal levels”.