How much waste does Alibaba produce? Their own figure for the year to 31 March 2026 is 457,975 tonnes (about 1.01 billion pounds), nearly four times what they reported a year earlier. It covers their own operations, not their marketplaces.
Almost none of that increase is extra rubbish. They counted more of themselves, and their report says so.
Alibaba's only waste promise is that certified contractors take it away, and they report it as kept. Nothing in it caps the tonnage. They counted 457,975 tonnes across their data centres, supermarkets and offices in the year to March 2026, and nobody counts what their marketplaces set moving.
Alibaba's waste year by year (2022-2026)
Alibaba report hazardous and non-hazardous waste as two separate lines in the data table at the back of their annual environmental report. The totals below add the two together.
Their financial year ends on 31 March, so each row covers the twelve months up to that date.
| Year ended 31 March | Total waste (tonnes) | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 457,975 | +333,886 (+269%) |
| 2025 | 124,089 | +38,458 (+45%) |
| 2024 | 85,631 | +6,631 (+8%) |
| 2023 | 79,000 | +1,400 (+2%) |
| 2022 | 77,600 | baseline |
Note: The 2024 to 2026 figures are Alibaba's own, from the ESG key performance table in their 2026 environmental report. They left those cells blank before that, so 2022 and 2023 are our estimates, scaled on Alibaba's reported revenue at the waste-per-revenue ratio of the first year they measured.
Why the newest figure jumped so far
The explanation sits in Alibaba's own footnote to that table. They "enhanced data governance and management, which led to more complete data about waste for a few businesses". More of the company got measured, so more waste showed up on the page.
So the 269% rise is a measurement story rather than a waste story. Tripling your rubbish in twelve months takes enormous growth, and Alibaba's revenue rose 3% over the same period.
The group got smaller while the number got bigger
Alibaba walked out of physical retail over the same stretch. Their sale of Sun Art, which runs the RT-Mart hypermarkets, was complete by 31 March 2025, and in December 2024 they agreed to sell their whole stake in the Intime department store chain.
The group that reported 457,975 tonnes therefore runs fewer shops than the one that reported 85,631. It also means the two estimated years at the bottom of the table are probably on the low side, because Alibaba still owned all those hypermarkets and department stores then.
The businesses inside Alibaba
Alibaba is not one shop, and that matters for where the waste sits. It is a group, and six parts of it are worth knowing before you read another number on this page.
-
Taobao and Tmall. The consumer marketplaces at the centre of the group. Alibaba host the sellers, and the sellers ship the goods.
-
Alibaba Cloud. Data centres and computing, with revenue of 158,132 million yuan in the year to March 2026, up 34%. Its waste is dead hardware.
-
Cainiao. The logistics arm that packs, sorts and moves parcels, and the reason Alibaba report packaging at all.
-
Freshippo. Supermarkets and fresh food delivery, where most of the waste is food.
-
AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol, Daraz and 1688.com. The international and wholesale marketplaces.
-
Xianyu. A second-hand marketplace, where the whole point is that something gets used twice.
The group turned over 1,023,670 million yuan (about 148 billion US dollars) in the year to March 2026 and employed 131,462 people at the end of it. Spread across those employees, the reported waste works out at roughly 3.5 tonnes each.
Where the reported waste comes from
Alibaba are specific about the boundary. In their words, waste "primarily stems from the business activities of Alibaba Cloud and Freshippo as well as the daily usage of our office campuses". Three sources, three different problems.
Data centres where the waste is hardware
Alibaba Cloud runs its own management system for hazardous waste at data centre campuses, and says 100% of it goes to licensed vendors for disposal. Old kit gets triaged instead of binned.
In the year to March 2026, servers totalling 28.51 million processor cores had their warranties extended, and parts from 15,593 retired servers went into the recycling stream.
Storage drives are the exception, because the data on them has to be destroyed. Recyclers must shred them physically, and the plastics and metals then go back into manufacturing rather than becoming e-waste.
Supermarkets where the waste is food
Freshippo's problem is food waste. They forecast each day's demand from shopping habits, holidays and weather so that stores order less than they used to.
What is left over gets routed rather than dumped. Near-expiry stock goes into food bank lockers in local communities, kitchen waste goes to licensed processors, and used paper packaging goes to paper mills to be pulped again.
From the door, a Freshippo store looks like any other supermarket, as this one did in February 2025.
Offices where the waste is everything else
Alibaba finished digitising waste measurement across their own campuses by 31 March 2026, which is what made the fuller count possible. Six of those campuses became the first sites certified under T/CAS 1112-2025, a Chinese zero-waste office standard Alibaba helped write.
Their Beijing campus is the strongest example. It recycled 100% of its kitchen waste in the year, fermenting it into fertiliser instead of sending it away.
Alibaba's main campus in Hangzhou, below, is the largest of the sites now inside that measured boundary.
Alibaba's waste per million yuan of revenue
Waste intensity is waste divided by revenue, and it answers a different question than the total does. It tells you whether a company is making more rubbish per unit of business, or simply doing more business. Alibaba publish it, and it moves the same way the total does.
| Year ended 31 March | Non-hazardous | Hazardous |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 0.45 | 0.0014 |
| 2025 | 0.13 | 0.0007 |
| 2024 | 0.10 | 0.0016 |
Note: Both columns are Alibaba's own published intensities, in tonnes of waste per million yuan of revenue. This table stops at 2024 because that is the first year they published an intensity, and estimating the earlier ones would just repeat the ratio we used to estimate them.
Revenue grew 3% in the year to March 2026 while reported waste rose 269%, which pushed intensity from 0.13 to 0.45. A company really making three times the rubbish per yuan would have had to change how it operates, and the report describes no such change.
Hazardous waste is the smaller line. It has bounced between 640 and 1,467 tonnes across the three years Alibaba have measured it, without settling into a trend, which fits a business whose hazardous waste is mostly dead servers.
The packaging Alibaba put into the world
Packaging gets its own line, separate from waste, because it does not become rubbish on Alibaba's premises. It becomes rubbish in the customer's home.
| Year ended 31 March | Packaging used (tonnes) | Change on prior year (tonnes) |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 191,898 | +3,294 |
| 2025 | 188,604 | -23,988 |
| 2024 | 212,592 | +16,592 |
| 2023 | 196,000 | +3,300 |
| 2022 | 192,700 | baseline |
Note: The 2024 to 2026 figures are Alibaba's own and cover the logistics they fulfil or buy themselves for Cainiao, AliExpress and Lazada. Packaging bought by the merchants selling on their marketplaces is not counted, and 2022 and 2023 are estimated the same way as the waste table.
Cainiao say they avoided about 189,000 tonnes of packaging material in the year to March 2026 through lighter packing, recycling and reuse. That is almost as much as the packaging Alibaba report using, which looks odd next to a total that went up.
Both numbers hold, because they measure different things. The 189,000 tonnes is material Cainiao say they did not need compared with packing the same parcels the old way, not a fall in what they actually used.
The reuse work behind it is real and countable.
-
Boxes used more than once. Cainiao reused over 24 million cardboard boxes in warehousing during the year.
-
Crates instead of cartons. A pool of around 143,000 reusable crates had logged more than 1.4 million uses by 31 March 2026, roughly ten trips each.
-
Boxes collected at the door. In Singapore, Lazada print return instructions on their boxes so couriers can take the corrugated cardboard back for reuse.
-
Paperless waybills. Standardised electronic waybills removed the printed slip that used to ride on every parcel.
Where extended producer responsibility rules apply, a company has to report the weight of the packaging it puts on the market and pay a fee on it.
That is why packaging EPR data tends to be more complete than voluntary reporting. Alibaba's figure is voluntary, so the boundary is theirs to draw.
Where Alibaba's count stops
Put the two boundaries side by side and the gap is easy to see. Alibaba count the waste from their data centres, supermarkets and offices, plus the packaging on deliveries they handle themselves. On paper, everything else on their platforms belongs to someone else.
The uncounted part is not small. Chinese couriers handled 198.95 billion parcels in 2025, 13.6% more than the year before, according to figures from the State Post Bureau, and the country passed 100 billion again by the end of June 2026.
Taobao and Tmall sit at the front of that flow. An estimate by Guosen Securities put Alibaba's platforms at about 46% of China's e-commerce market at the end of 2022.
Nobody publishes a waste figure for all of that, Alibaba included, and this page is not going to invent one. What can be said with confidence is that 457,975 tonnes is the part Alibaba can see from inside their own buildings.
Every marketplace has this gap. Our estimate of Temu's waste had to be built from the outside in because Temu publish nothing at all, and the best-known figure for Amazon's waste comes from counting parcels rather than bins.
How Alibaba's carbon footprint compares
Waste is the smallest of Alibaba's environmental numbers by a wide margin, and their carbon footprint is where the scale of the group actually shows up.
| Year ended 31 March | Total emissions scopes 1 to 3 (tonnes CO2e) | Emissions per million yuan of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 10,499,711 | 10.2 |
| 2025 | 10,689,745 | 11.5 |
| 2024 | 10,290,709 | 11.6 |
| 2023 | 9,927,762 | 12.5 |
| 2022 | 10,460,720 | 13.7 |
Note: Alibaba's own figures. Scope 3, meaning emissions from up and down their value chain rather than their own sites, accounted for 8,182,369 tonnes of the 2026 total.
At 10.5 million tonnes of CO2e, the carbon number is about 23 times the waste number. It has also barely moved in five years while intensity fell from 13.7 to 10.2, which is what a growing company on cleaner power looks like.
Clean electricity reached 62.2% of Alibaba's mix, and 73.6% at their own data centres.
Alibaba also publish an avoided emissions figure of around 100 million tonnes for the year, counting reductions they say their platforms brought about for other people. Xianyu, the second-hand marketplace, accounts for 12.788 million tonnes of it.
That is a count of what did not happen elsewhere, not a cut in Alibaba's own footprint.
The one waste goal Alibaba set for themselves
Alibaba's climate targets are dated and specific. Carbon neutrality in their own operations by 2030, a 50% cut in value chain emissions intensity by 2030 against 2020, and cloud computing on 100% clean electricity from 2030.
The biggest of them reaches outside the company. Alibaba have promised 1.5 gigatonnes of reductions across their platforms between 2021 and 2035.
Their waste goal, in full, is that "100% of our waste disposal is handled by certified contractors". The report marks it as implemented.
That is a goal about who takes the waste away, not about how much there is. Alibaba set no target to cut waste tonnage, no recycling rate to reach, and nothing about keeping material out of landfill or an incinerator.
The work itself is not missing. Reusing 24 million boxes, extending the life of 28.51 million processor cores and certifying six zero-waste campuses all happened, and all of it is counted.
None of it is tied to a tonnage Alibaba have promised to hit, so the 457,975 tonnes on this page has no target sitting next to it.
Frequently asked questions about Alibaba's waste
Below are the questions readers ask most often about Alibaba's waste, answered from their own published figures.
How much waste does Alibaba produce each year?
Alibaba reported 457,975 tonnes for the twelve months to 31 March 2026, made up of 456,508 tonnes of non-hazardous waste and 1,467 tonnes of hazardous waste. That covers their own operations rather than their marketplaces.
Why did Alibaba's reported waste nearly quadruple in one year?
Because they counted more of it. Alibaba's own footnote says they improved their data governance, which produced more complete waste data for some businesses. The jump is a reporting change, not 334,000 tonnes of extra rubbish.
Does Alibaba publish a single total waste figure?
No. They publish hazardous and non-hazardous waste as two separate lines, and packaging as a third. Adding the two waste lines gives the 457,975 tonnes on this page.
What kind of waste does Alibaba produce most of?
Non-hazardous waste, at 456,508 of the 457,975 tonnes. Alibaba do not break it down further, but they name Alibaba Cloud, Freshippo and their office campuses as where it comes from.
How much packaging does Alibaba use?
191,898 tonnes in the year to March 2026, up 1.7% on the year before and still below the 212,592 tonnes of two years earlier. The figure covers the deliveries Alibaba run or buy themselves, not merchant packing.
Is the packaging on Taobao and Tmall parcels counted?
Not unless Alibaba handled the delivery. Merchants buy their own boxes and bags and often ship with couriers Alibaba did not hire, so that packaging lands in nobody's published total.
How big is Alibaba's carbon footprint?
10,499,711 tonnes of CO2e across scopes 1 to 3 in the year to March 2026, roughly 23 times their waste tonnage. Scope 3, the part outside their own sites, is 8,182,369 tonnes of it.
Has Alibaba set a target to cut their waste?
No. Their only published waste goal is that all waste disposal goes to certified contractors, which they report as achieved. Every reduction target they have set sits on carbon and energy instead.
How does Alibaba compare with Amazon or Temu?
Not directly, because the figures measure different things. Alibaba's is a reported operational total, our Temu estimate covers a whole marketplace, and Amazon's best-known figure counts plastic packaging. They are not like for like.
Images: Danielinblue, Windmemories
