China Waste from single-day delivery activities on November 11 will increase sharply without restraint measures, Greenpeace warned.

The amount of packaging materials used in e-commerce and delivery reached 9.4 million tons last year and is expected to increase more than four times to 41.3 million tons by 2025, the environmental activist group Greenpeace and nonprofit organizations today issued a warning, amid the e-commerce sales record set on 11/11, also known as Singles' Day in China.

In just the first hour of this year's Singles' Day, China's Alibaba Group reached $ 12 billion in e-commerce sales. Last year, the number of packages shipped on the occasion was 1.88 billion, up to 26% from the previous year, according to the China Post Bureau. Greenpeace estimates more than 250,000 tons of waste is generated from these packages, although there are no official statistics.

"E-commerce giants often give only weak feedback, they wait for regulations to be issued," said Tang Damin, Greenpeace's plastic waste reduction campaigner in the Chinese capital Beijing.

China has turned recycling into a profitable business, as land for landfill becomes scarce and fears plastic waste is increasing in the environment, but it has not solved the problem of waste from ecommerce. According to environmental groups, only about 5% of plastic used in the packaging of goods is recycled.

This month, Alibaba said it was "greener than ever" and rewarded customers with recycling. Alibaba's delivery company Cainiao also sees November 20 as the recycling day for paperboard. E-commerce firm JD.com announced a reduction in the use of tape and paper at its warehouse, in addition to the application of many other recycled materials.

"We cannot say that China does not recycle garbage," said Antoine Grange, executive director of recycling at SUEZ Asia, saying that the estimated recycling rate could be as high as 25%. "The difficult problem in China is traceability and lack of waste sorting infrastructure," he said.