The biggest packaging polluters in ecommerce put an estimated 34 million tonnes of packaging into the world in 2026. Below is the ranking of the twenty largest, from Taobao and Tmall at roughly 9.7 million tonnes down to Otto at about 27,000.
Almost none of them publish that figure. Only two of the twenty report enough for the number to come straight from their own accounts, so every other row here is an estimate built from parcel volumes and the measured weight of a parcel.
The 20 biggest ecommerce companies and what we know about their waste
Below are the twenty biggest ecommerce companies in the world, ranked by the packaging waste their parcels put into the world in 2026.
The list itself is chosen by size. These are the twenty largest sellers of physical goods online, and they end up among the biggest packaging polluters for an obvious reason. They have the most customers, so they ship the most orders, so they put the most boxes and bags into the world.
The ranking counts packaging only, meaning the boxes, bags, tape and filler that go on a parcel. It is not total company waste, which would also take in factory offcuts, unsold stock and warehouse waste.
That distinction matters. Companies measure their total waste on very different boundaries, so ranking on those totals would compare things that are not comparable.
Where we have published a full waste page for a company, its name links to it.
| Rank and company | Estimated packaging waste 2026 | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Taobao and Tmall | 9,700,000 t | Estimated |
| 2. Pinduoduo | 9,000,000 t | Estimated |
| 3. Douyin | 4,500,000 t | Estimated |
| 4. JD.com | 2,900,000 t | Estimated |
| 5. Amazon | at least 2,800,000 t | From disclosed parcels |
| 6. Shopee | 2,100,000 t | From disclosed orders |
| 7. Walmart | 510,000 t | Estimated |
| 8. eBay | 420,000 t | Estimated |
| 9. Coupang | 380,000 t | Estimated |
| 10. MercadoLibre | 360,000 t | From disclosed items |
| 11. TikTok Shop | 310,000 t | Estimated |
| 12. Temu | 300,000 t | Estimated |
| 13. Flipkart | 210,000 t | Estimated |
| 14. AliExpress | 191,898 t | Published by Alibaba |
| 15. SHEIN | 150,000 t | Estimated |
| 16. Wayfair | 150,000 t | Estimated |
| 17. Rakuten | 140,000 t | Estimated |
| 18. Allegro | 130,000 t | Estimated |
| 19. Zalando | 59,000 t | From Zalando's own reporting |
| 20. Otto | 27,000 t | Estimated |
Amazon sits at number five on a figure that is deliberately a floor. The 13 billion parcels behind it are the ones Amazon delivered same-day or next-day, which is only part of what they ship, so their true position is higher and probably above JD.com.
The top ten as you would recognise them
The top of this ranking is not where a European reader would expect it to be, which is easier to see with the brand marks in front of you.
Wish vanished before anyone counted it
Wish is not ranked above. The company was sold in 2024 and its last real year was 2020, so it cannot sit in a 2026 table. It still earns a mention, because it is the clearest example on this page of how little of this gets measured.
At its peak Wish shipped over 640 million items in a year, and filed detailed accounts as a US-listed company for a decade. Not one of those filings reports the weight of a single bag.
Our Wish waste page puts that peak at roughly 111,000 tonnes of packaging, built entirely from item volumes disclosed for other reasons.
How this ranking was built and why it is an estimate
This is an estimated ranking. Nobody publishes a league table of ecommerce packaging waste, and almost none of these companies publish their own number.
The method is the same for every company. Take the parcels they ship in a year, then multiply by what the packaging on one parcel weighs.
- Parcel volumes. Shopee, MercadoLibre and Amazon publish theirs. For the Chinese platforms we start from China's official national total, 214 billion parcels forecast for 2026, split by our own estimate of each platform's share.
- Packaging weight. An Asian parcel counts as 151 grams, taken from China's own published packaging total. A Western parcel counts as 212 grams, the weight Zalando publish per order, which is a conservative floor.
- Everything else. Where a company publishes neither figure, the estimate starts from their sales and an assumed basket size. Those rows are marked estimated in the table.
It is not a ranking by revenue. Waste follows parcels rather than money, and a 1,200 euro phone and a 4 euro phone case are one parcel each.
Six platforms carry nine tenths of the tonnage
The top six account for 31.0 of the 34.3 million tonnes: Taobao and Tmall 9.7 million, Pinduoduo 9.0 million, Douyin 4.5 million, JD.com 2.9 million, Amazon 2.8 million and Shopee 2.1 million. The fourteen companies below them share the remaining 3.3 million tonnes.
What the companies with a waste page actually report
Seven of the twenty have a full waste page on this site. Reading across them, the pattern is less about how much these companies throw away and more about how little of it they are willing to count.
- Taobao and Tmall. Alibaba's own environmental report puts the group's waste at 457,975 tonnes across data centres, supermarkets and offices. The packaging on Taobao's parcels is roughly twenty times that, and appears in no report anywhere.
- Amazon. They publish a plastic packaging figure, 66,500 tonnes for 2026, and nothing at all for cardboard, which is the bulk of what they actually ship.
- Walmart. They publish a landfill diversion rate every year, 83.5% at the last count, and have never once published the total it is a percentage of.
- Temu. Their total waste runs to about 2.9 million tonnes once supplier factory offcuts and discarded product are counted. Temu publish no waste or emissions data of their own.
- AliExpress. No AliExpress figure exists anywhere. The 191,898 tonnes in the table is a single line Alibaba publish across AliExpress, Cainiao and Lazada together, with no split between them.
- SHEIN. About 1.228 million tonnes in total, and unlike most of this list the figure is still climbing year on year.
- Zalando. They moved their shipping bags from plastic to paper and keep 99% of packaging recyclable. The total volume still rises every year.
The cheapest platforms do the most damage per sale
Packaging follows parcels, not money. One order is one parcel whether it cost 4 euros or 1,200, so a platform selling cheap things in huge volume ships far more packaging per euro than one selling expensive things.
Shopee's own 2025 results show it plainly. They report 127.4 billion dollars of sales across 13.9 billion orders, which is about nine dollars an order.
Three things follow from that.
- Cheap baskets mean more parcels. At about nine dollars an order, 90 dollars of shopping is ten separate orders and ten separate parcels. On a platform with a much larger average basket, the same money arrives as one or two.
- Every parcel costs the same in packaging. The bag, label, tape and filler are much the same whether the contents are worth 4 euros or 400.
- The ranking flips per euro. Measured against sales rather than in total, Pinduoduo, Temu, SHEIN and Shopee move to the top and the premium sellers drop to the bottom.
Ultra-low-cost ecommerce is not just big. It is structurally the most packaging-intensive way to sell anything.
The biggest packaging polluters report the least
Disclosure runs backwards on this list. The four companies at the top account for about 26 million tonnes between them, and not one publishes anything about its parcel packaging.
The two whose figures come from their own reporting, AliExpress and Zalando, sit at fourteenth and nineteenth.
It is not only a Chinese problem. Amazon publish plastic and skip cardboard, Walmart publish a percentage and skip the total, and eBay, Coupang, Flipkart and Rakuten publish neither.
The packaging figures that come from the companies' own reporting add up to about 250,000 tonnes: 191,898 tonnes from the Alibaba line that covers AliExpress, and 59,000 tonnes from Zalando. Set against the 34 million tonnes on the whole list, that is less than 1%.
Some platforms are further along than others
Not everyone on this list is standing still, and it would be unfair to write as though they were. Three of them have published something concrete about reducing packaging rather than just reporting it.
- Amazon. Their plastic packaging is down about a third since 2023, which is the clearest reduction anyone on this list has published.
- Zalando. They moved their shipping bags from plastic to paper and keep 99% of packaging recyclable. They are also one of only two companies here whose figure comes from their own reporting.
- Alibaba. Their logistics arm Cainiao says it avoided about 189,000 tonnes of packaging material in the year to March 2026 through lighter packing, recycling and reuse.
At the other end, Temu and SHEIN publish no waste data of their own at all, and SHEIN's total is one of the few on this list still climbing year on year.
There is a catch that applies to all three of them, though. Using less packaging per parcel does not mean less packaging overall, not if the number of parcels keeps rising faster.
Zalando is the clearest case. Their packaging is lighter and more recyclable than it used to be, and their total volume still goes up every year.
What these platforms owe under EPR rules
Under extended producer responsibility, the packaging on this list is not only the merchant's problem. EU rules increasingly place packaging EPR obligations on the marketplace itself, especially where the seller sits outside the EU. That is exactly the packaging the top of this table does not count.
Every tonne in this table belongs to someone. Packaging placed on a market is a reportable quantity, and the duty follows whoever put it there, counted or not.
The duty has three parts.
- Register in every market you sell into, for every waste stream you touch.
- Report the weight of packaging you place on each of those markets, split by material.
- Pay the fee that scheme sets, increasingly modulated by how recyclable the material is.
A parcel count satisfies none of that. A company can know its volumes to the nearest thousand and still not know what it owes.
That is because EPR reporting is calculated per material, per market and per scheme, and every register asks a slightly different question. Closing that gap is what Repax is built for.
Try Repax Core for free - no card required Describe your products once and Core builds the report each market and scheme expects. Try it freeNone of this makes the tonnage smaller. It makes it countable, which is the part most of the companies in this table have not done.
Frequently asked questions about ecommerce packaging waste
Below are the six questions readers ask most often about this ranking.
Which ecommerce company produces the most packaging waste?
Taobao and Tmall, at an estimated 9.7 million tonnes in 2026. The figure covers packaging on parcels sold through the platforms and is built from China's national parcel volume, because Alibaba do not publish a packaging figure for Taobao.
How much packaging waste does ecommerce produce in total?
The twenty biggest ecommerce companies account for an estimated 34 million tonnes in 2026. The top six carry about 31 million tonnes of that, so the total is driven almost entirely by the largest Chinese platforms and Amazon.
Do ecommerce companies report their packaging waste?
Almost none of them. Of the twenty biggest, only AliExpress and Zalando publish enough for a packaging figure to come from their own reporting, and the AliExpress line is shared with two sister companies rather than broken out.
Does this ranking cover all of a company's waste?
No. It counts the packaging on their parcels only, meaning boxes, bags, tape and filler. Factory offcuts, unsold stock and warehouse waste are excluded, because companies measure those on boundaries too different to compare.
Why is Temu ranked below the Chinese domestic platforms?
Temu ships a large number of parcels but is still far smaller than Taobao, Pinduoduo or Douyin, which operate at Chinese domestic scale. Measured per euro of sales rather than in total, Temu moves close to the top of the list.
How was this ranking calculated?
Annual parcel volume multiplied by the weight of packaging on one parcel. Volumes come from company filings where they exist and from China's official national parcel total where they do not, and packaging is counted at 151 grams per Asian parcel.
