SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China’s top e-commerce platforms have made insufficient effort to steer consumers onto a more sustainable path that would help protect the environment and combat climate change, environment group Greenpeace said on Thursday.
“There’s been clear progress for some of these companies since the last time we did a formal analysis,” said Tang Damin, Greenpeace project manager in Beijing. “But overall, China’s e-commerce giants still don’t do enough to leverage their platforms towards sustainability.”
In a report ranking the environmental record of six of China’s e-commerce giants, Greenpeace said the discount online shopping platform Pinduoduo performed the worst, making “no progress whatsoever” on climate and environmental protection.
Pinduoduo was given a negative score on Greenpeace’s list after failing to draw up strategies on issues like climate change, waste, dangerous chemicals and biodiversity.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pinduoduo was also the only company among the six assessed not to have implemented measures to ban illegal plant and animal trading.
The report also said that while video app operators Kuaishou and Douyin had both taken action, prohibited products were still available on their platforms as of late August. Neither Kuaishou nor Douyin owner Bytedance responded to requests for comment.
Greenpeace said Alibaba was the best performer, and was the only one of the six with “a strategy to respond to climate change through engaging and enabling users and businesses on its platform.”
It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Sophie Yu, Josh Ye and Casey Hall; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
