How much waste does AliExpress produce? Nobody publishes the answer, not AliExpress and not Alibaba who own them. The nearest official number is 191,898 tonnes (about 423 million pounds) of packaging, reported for the year to 31 March 2026 across three businesses at once.
That total stops at the parcel. It weighs the box and bag that become waste on delivery day, and counts nothing the goods inside turn into.
Alibaba report their environmental figures down to the tonne. AliExpress still has no number of its own. It is folded into 191,898 tonnes of packaging shared with two sister businesses, and nothing published anywhere counts the goods themselves.
The packaging waste total AliExpress sits in (2022-2026)
Packaging is waste with a short delay built into it. A box or a mailer has one job, holding the goods together for a few days in transit, and then it goes in a bin at the address it was sent to.
That is why producer responsibility rules count the weight a company puts onto the market rather than the weight it throws out itself. What goes out is what becomes waste.
Alibaba publish one such weight a year, covering the logistics they run or pay for on behalf of three of their businesses. AliExpress is one of the three.
Their financial year ends on 31 March, so each row below covers the twelve months up to that date.
| Year ended 31 March | Packaging used (tonnes) | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 191,898 | +3,294 (+1.7%) |
| 2025 | 188,604 | -23,988 (-11.3%) |
| 2024 | 212,592 | +16,592 (+8.5%) |
| 2023 | 196,000 | +3,300 (+1.7%) |
| 2022 | 192,700 | baseline |
Note: The 2024 to 2026 weights are Alibaba's own, from the data table at the back of their 2026 environmental report. They left 2022 and 2023 blank, so those two years are our estimates, scaled on reported group revenue at the packaging-per-revenue ratio of 2024.
What that tonnage looks like as waste
Nearly all of it is single-use transit material, the boxes, mailers, tape and filler that hold a parcel together from the warehouse to the door, with no second job once it is opened.
At 191,898 tonnes a year, that is roughly 525 tonnes of packaging entering bins every day.
Eurostat put EU packaging waste at 177.8 kg per person in 2023, so the annual weight above is about what 1.1 million people in Europe discard in packaging over a year.
Almost none of it is thrown out by Alibaba. A cross-border parcel is opened in a home in Spain, Poland or Brazil, so the box becomes household waste in whichever country it was delivered to.
The three businesses sharing that number
Alibaba name the three businesses in a single sentence. The weight covers logistics services they fulfil or procure for Cainiao, which is their delivery arm, for AliExpress, and for Lazada, their south-east Asian marketplace.
Cainiao move far more parcels inside China than AliExpress ship across borders, so most of that weight belongs to deliveries that never leave the country.
How much of it is AliExpress is not published. Alibaba give no parcel count, no order count and no packaging split for any of the three, so the share cannot be worked out honestly from the outside.
Why the total barely moves
Five years sitting between 188,000 and 213,000 tonnes look like a business standing still, which AliExpress is not. Two things explain it.
The first is that Alibaba have been taking packaging out. In the year to March 2026, Cainiao cut their material use by around 189,000 tonnes through lighter packing, recycling and reuse.
They also reused more than 24 million cardboard boxes in their warehouses, and ran a pool of about 143,000 reusable crates through more than 1.4 million trips, close to ten journeys per crate.
The second reason matters more. The figure never grew with the marketplaces, because it never counted them. It counts deliveries Alibaba handle, not everything sold on a platform they own.
Who AliExpress are
AliExpress is the shop window Alibaba built for the rest of the world. Launched in 2010, it lets people anywhere buy straight from manufacturers and distributors, most of them in China, with no retailer in between.
That is the part worth holding on to. AliExpress do not make the goods, do not own most of the stock and, on a large share of orders, do not pack the parcel. They run the marketplace.
A few numbers give the scale.
- Alibaba's own annual report puts AliExpress in more than 200 countries and regions as of 31 March 2026, in 16 languages.
- The European Commission list 104.3 million average monthly users in the EU, the figure AliExpress declared when they were named a very large online platform in April 2023.
- The international retail arm they sit in turned over RMB 117,731 million in the year to March 2026, up 9%, although that figure also carries Trendyol, Lazada and Daraz.
- Their Choice service, launched in March 2023, pools orders into Alibaba-run warehouses and promises free shipping and free returns.
Why an AliExpress parcel lands in nobody's total
Waste reporting follows ownership, and a marketplace owns very little. A factory reports the offcuts from its own floor. A shop reports what its own bins hold. AliExpress have neither.
Three separate pieces of waste come off one AliExpress order, and on paper each of them belongs to somebody else.
- The seller's own packaging. Bought by the merchant, so it sits in no group report anywhere.
- The parcel packaging. Alibaba's only when Alibaba handle the delivery, which is what the 191,898 tonnes measures.
- The product. The buyer's the moment it arrives, and household waste in whichever country it landed in.
This is not unique to AliExpress. The same gap runs through Alibaba's own group waste figure, and our estimate of the waste behind Temu had to be built from the outside for exactly this reason.
What makes AliExpress the clearest case is that they are the one platform whose packaging is partly inside a published number and partly outside it.
The gap is closing, though. Marketplace EPR rules increasingly make the platform answerable for the packaging its sellers put on the market, and that is what turns a voluntary figure into a reported one.
The parcels Europe counted
Where AliExpress do not publish, customs do. Every low-value consignment arriving in the EU is counted, and that count is the best public measure of the traffic AliExpress is part of.
| Year | Low-value items entering the EU | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 5.9 billion | - |
| 2025 | 5.9 billion | +1.3 billion (+26%) |
| 2024 | 4.6 billion | +2.2 billion (+92%) |
| 2023 | 2.4 billion | +1.0 billion (+75%) |
| 2022 | 1.4 billion | baseline |
Note: Figures from the European Commission's customs statistics, which publish 2023 as a 75% rise rather than a count. The Commission have not published 2026, so that row holds 2025 flat rather than projecting growth through the duty introduced on 1 July.
A low-value item is one worth €150 or less. Those items are now around 97% of everything the EU imports by count, and only around 2.1% of it by value. The average one is worth €8.82.
China is the origin of 93% of them. AliExpress, Temu and Shein are the three platforms EU institutions name whenever that traffic comes up, and AliExpress is the oldest of the three by more than a decade.
Nobody publishes how the 5.9 billion splits between them, so this page does not guess at it. What the number does establish is the shape of the waste. It is small, individually wrapped and shipped one order at a time, which is the most material-hungry way to move anything.
What arrives in the box
Packaging is only the part that becomes waste immediately. Whether the product follows it into the bin depends on whether the product works, and Europe has now measured that.
During 2025, 27 customs authorities and 108 market surveillance authorities ran a joint inspection of goods bought online, in two phases.
| What was checked | Items inspected | Share failing EU rules |
|---|---|---|
| Toys and small electronics | 20,040 | 64% |
| Cosmetics | 5,772 | 65% |
| Food supplements | 3,474 | 63% |
| Personal protective equipment | 2,092 | 60% |
Note: From the European Commission's e-commerce compliance findings, covering April to June and October to December 2025. Results are published across marketplaces, which the Commission do not name, so none of these rates is AliExpress's own.
Of the toys and electronics that went on to a laboratory, 84% were found dangerous. The Commission list choking, electric shock, chemicals and asphyxiation among the hazards.
A product that fails its safety rules has a short life by definition. It gets stopped at the border, recalled, or thrown out by the person who bought it. Either way it was made, wrapped, flown and then wasted, which is the whole footprint of an item with none of the use.
The rules about to put a name on the parcel
Three changes in EU law are moving the cost of these parcels onto the platforms that ship them. Between them they are what will eventually produce the number this page cannot give you.
- A duty on every low-value item. Since 1 July 2026 the EU charges €3 per declared item on consignments worth €150 or less, ending the exemption that let them arrive duty free. On an average item worth €8.82, that is roughly a third added to the price.
- The platform becomes the importer. Under the customs reform agreed in March 2026 and now going through formal adoption, sellers and platforms making distance sales into the EU are treated as importers. They must give customs the data, pay or guarantee the charges, and make sure the goods comply. Repeat failures carry fines of 1% to 6% of the value imported over the previous year.
- A limit on the air in the box. PPWR Article 24 caps the empty space ratio in e-commerce packaging at 50% from 1 January 2030, and the regulation is explicit that air cushions, bubble wrap and foam chips count as empty space rather than as filling.
None of the three asks AliExpress to publish a waste tonnage. What they do is make somebody legally answerable for each parcel, and reporting follows responsibility. That is the same shift that has already pulled cross-border sellers into national packaging registers.
What AliExpress say about their footprint
Their answer is efficiency rather than tonnage. In the year to March 2026, according to Alibaba's environmental report, AliExpress moved from packing each merchant's goods separately to combining several merchants' products in one warehouse.
That cuts the number of packages travelling on the long haul, which is the leg where a cross-border parcel does most of its damage.
They also built a freight network across sea, land, air and rail to get goods out of the air where they can, rebuilt their returns handling across major markets, and signed the EU's Product Safety Pledge.
Each of those lowers the waste per parcel. None of them is a figure for how much waste there is, and on the product side the movement has been the other way.
On 20 July 2026 the European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million, the largest penalty yet issued under the Digital Services Act.
The Commission found they had fallen short of their duty to assess the risk of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products spreading through their service, and had failed to take effective measures against it.
Frequently asked questions about AliExpress waste
Below are the seven questions people ask most often about AliExpress and waste.
How much waste does AliExpress produce each year?
No figure exists. AliExpress publish none, and the nearest official number is the 191,898 tonnes of packaging waste Alibaba reported for the year to 31 March 2026, which covers AliExpress alongside Cainiao and Lazada without splitting them.
Does Alibaba report AliExpress separately?
No. Alibaba report one packaging weight for logistics they fulfil or procure across three businesses, and one group waste figure covering their data centres, supermarkets and offices. Neither is broken down by platform.
What kind of waste does an AliExpress order create?
Three kinds. The seller's own packaging, the parcel packaging added for shipping, and the product itself once it reaches the buyer. Only the middle one reaches any published number, and only when Alibaba handled the delivery.
Why can nobody estimate AliExpress waste from the outside?
Because the starting number is missing. Alibaba publish no parcel count, no order count and no sales figure for AliExpress alone, only growth rates, so there is nothing to multiply a packaging weight by.
How many AliExpress parcels arrive in Europe?
That is not published either. What is published is the total. Close to 5.9 billion low-value items entered the EU in 2025, 93% of them from China, with AliExpress one of three platforms EU institutions name as driving the traffic.
Are goods bought on marketplaces like AliExpress safe?
Often not. EU customs and market surveillance authorities checked 20,040 toys and small electronics bought online during 2025 and found 64% broke EU rules, with 84% of the laboratory-tested items judged dangerous. The marketplaces were not named.
Will AliExpress have to report its packaging in future?
Probably, in the EU at least. Marketplace EPR rules and the customs reform agreed in March 2026 both make platforms answerable for the goods they ship, and packaging reporting normally follows legal responsibility rather than goodwill.
