Growing mountain of express delivery packaging needs reducing and reusing

THE TOTAL VOLUME of China's express delivery industry has been the largest in the world for three consecutive years, and it has contributed 40 percent of the growth in the global express delivery business, the State Post Bureau said on Monday. Legal Daily comments:

The revenue of China's express delivery industry has grown 2.7 fold over the past five years. That rosy figure means China handles 100 million express deliveries every day on average throughout a year. However, these packages pose a serious environmental threat, as statistics show less than 10 percent of the packing materials are collected and recycled. Most of the packaging ends up as landfill.

According to the China National Resources Recycling Association, even if the packaging was collected, it would require huge amounts of energy to process the materials for recycling.