Courier firms delivering mountain of waste
universities around the globe, helping them to understand the local environment and customs.
“We will go to every school to talk to local students, or Chinese students studying abroad, and will listen to one or two classes,” Huang Xinyi, an aspiring sociology major, was quoted as saying.
The father-daughter duo are beginning their trip in Nanjing (南京), with Southeast University the first stop on their tour.
Their plan is to drive through countries including Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Turkey, then enter Europe and head for Britain. Once there, they will check-in their four-wheel drive and travel on to the United Sates, including trips to Canada and Mexico.
The father and daughter have previously travelled some 120,000km together with Huang’s wife and niece as part of a promotion for the Youth Olympic Games held in Nanjing in 2014.
That 300-day trip took them through 30 provinces on the mainland, plus into Asia and Europe and as far north as the Arctic.
With their previous road trip experiences in mind, they said they had planned out each day meticulously.
The pair will face numerous hurdles on the journey, including obtaining visas for all the places they will travel through and navigating language barriers and foreign roads.
But both are full of hope for their journey, with the younger Huang quoted as saying: “The world is so large. As we are seeing the world, we should also put in an effort to help the world understand China and give this trip more meaning.”
– Less than one-tenth of the excessive packaging used in the 31.2 billion parcels that were delivered across the mainland last year was recycled, state news agency Xinhua reports.
The figures released last week were drawn from a 2016 report on the courier industry highlighting the issue of excessive packaging.
On the mainland, the courier industry is thriving thanks to a nationwide embrace of e-commerce. But sellers often wrap goods in an excessive amount of plastic packaging materials which are often not recyclable.
According to the industry report, the 31.2 billion parcels delivered last year represented a 50 per cent increase from 2015.
The State Post Bureau has previously said that courier firms in 2015 alone went through nearly 10 billion boxes and almost 17 billion metres of plastic tape – enough to go around the equator 425 times, according to the Xinhua report.
Cainiao, a platform that tracks parcels run by e-commerce giant Alibaba, said last June that the industry planned to replace half of the existing packaging materials with recyclable alternatives by 2020.
Cost is also an issue – standard plastic courier bags are 0.80 yuan (90 HK cents) each, while the cost of recyclable plastic courier bags is at least four times higher, according to the report.