Hangover from Singles Day a cause for mounting concern

I don't spend much time shopping online but I am aware of how big a deal Nov 11 is in China, not least because it brings headlines of record-breaking excess every year.

Alibaba's Singles Day shopping festival again broke records this year, with the e-commerce giant racking up a 26 percent increase in sales, to rake in 268 billion yuan ($38.4 billion).

Similarly, online retail platform JD reported that sales from its copycat online shopping event from Nov 1 to 11 generated an unprecedented 204 billion yuan in sales.

Singles Day began in the 1990s as an antidote to Valentine's Day, giving Chinese consumers outside of relationships a chance to pick up a little retail romance.

It is certainly a clever marketing idea and the discounts are undeniably appealing－as are the profits. It took just 96 seconds for Alibaba to rack up 10 billion yuan in sales.

Yet behind this retail success story, in recent years the environmental costs of such mass consumption have come under fire because of the rising mountains of residual packaging waste.

The 1.38 billion or so online orders this year saw postal and courier companies send more than 330 million packages, a 31.5 percent increase year-on-year, the State Post Bureau said.

The shopping spree is expected to have generated around 160,000 metric tons of packaging waste across China－cardboard, tape and plastic－according to a Greenpeace estimate.

This is significant because the recycling rate of packaging materials is extremely low.

Less than 10 percent of the paper, cardboard and plastic used in deliveries are recycled.

Worse still, the accumulated waste from China's e-commerce and delivery sectors is expected to more than quadruple by 2025, a report released jointly on Nov 11 by Greenpeace East Asia, the All-China Environment Federation and Break Free From Plastic China.

Emissions from delivery packaging services amounted to 13 million metric tons last year, a figure that would require around 700 million trees to be planted to offset its carbon cost.

And it's not just packaging waste that brings problems. The carbon footprint of the manufacturing and transport of the goods themselves is cause for concern.

For example, apparel sales accounted for more than 25 percent of Singles Day sales this year, yet the fashion industry in China produces more than 250,000 tons CO2 emissions annually－that's another 2.5 million trees that would need to be planted to neutralize the impact, the report said.

So while it's clear that the real cost of picking up a bargain online has a price tag much higher than advertised, another aspect of the report was even more telling.

The saturation marketing surrounding Singles Day is phenomenal, prompting millions of people to stay up until 1 minute past 1 am on Nov 11 to be first in line to snap up a deal.

The hype, together with the low prices, are the two biggest factors contributing to this excess consumerism, as Walton Li from Greenpeace Hong Kong pointed out. The aggressive "buy now" marketing that accompanies Singles Day promotions amplifies the impulse to shop.

"People keep getting duped, but because the items are so cheap, they don't mind and just keep buying and buying, fueling a vicious circle", he said.