Wish is estimated to produce around 1,250 metric tonnes (2.8 million pounds) of packaging waste in 2026, covering the bags, mailers and filler on their merchants' parcels. In their biggest year it was roughly 111,000 tonnes.
Wish never reported a waste figure of their own. The estimate rests on the item volumes they filed while listed, which stopped when the business changed hands in 2024. The marketplace itself is still trading.
Wish spent a decade telling investors they were one of the largest ecommerce marketplaces in the world. Their parcels now carry an estimated 1,250 tonnes of packaging a year, about one per cent of the peak.
Wish's annual waste totals (2020-2026)
Wish filed how many items they shipped for two of the years below and stopped afterwards. The table applies the same packaging weight to every year's volume.
| Year | Total waste (tonnes) | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 1,250 | -1,250 |
| 2025 | 2,500 | -2,700 |
| 2024 | 5,200 | -5,300 |
| 2023 | 10,500 | -9,000 |
| 2022 | 19,500 | -37,700 |
| 2021 | 57,200 | -54,200 |
| 2020 | 111,400 | baseline |
Note: Volumes to 2021 are Wish's own SEC filings, with 2022 and 2023 scaled on their reported buyer counts and 2024 to 2026 projected at the average annual decline of those years. Each parcel is costed at 174 g, the average across more than 8,000 Chinese express parcels in Nature Communications.
That per-parcel weight is the one number not taken from Wish. A lighter assumption of 151 g, the rate implied by China's more recent packaging total, puts the 2020 figure nearer 97,000 tonnes.
What the 2024 to 2026 rows rest on
The last three rows are the softest on the page, because nothing at all has been disclosed since the sale. Wish's buyer numbers fell by an average of 51% a year between 2021 and 2023, and those rows continue that rate.
Hold the decline at 25% a year instead and 2026 comes out nearer 4,400 tonnes. Assume 60% and it falls to around 700. The range for the current year is wide, and the direction is the reliable part of it.
Two things that happened after the sale argue for the steeper end. The merchant side closed to open signups, and the United States removed the duty-free allowance that made the parcels viable in the first place.
Where the weight actually fell
Almost 200,000 tonnes of packaging passed through Wish in the four years it still reported volumes, and four fifths of that fell in the first two. The waste fell because the platform shrank, not because anything about the packaging changed.
That makes Wish an unusual case in this series. Most companies here are getting bigger and reporting harder, while Wish has gone the other way, shrinking sharply and then leaving the public record altogether.
What is Wish?
Wish is an online marketplace where shoppers buy cheap goods directly from sellers, most of them in China. There is no shop and no warehouse in between, because the seller posts each order straight to the buyer.
The platform is built for browsing rather than searching. When Wish floated in 2020 more than 70% of sales came from a personalised feed rather than a search query, and over 90% of activity happened inside the phone app.
That model makes Wish one of the clearest examples of cross-border ecommerce EPR in practice, where goods enter a country one parcel at a time rather than by the container load.
Wish is owned today by Qoo10, a private company based in Singapore. Before that it was ContextLogic Inc., incorporated in Delaware in June 2010 and listed on Nasdaq under the ticker WISH.
The six dates below cover the whole arc, from incorporation to the platform trading today.
- 2010. Incorporated in Delaware as ContextLogic Inc., trading as Wish.
- 2018. Ranked the most downloaded shopping app in the world.
- December 2020. Floated on Nasdaq at $24.00 a share, raising about $1.1 billion.
- 2022. Revenue fell 73% in a single year, from $2.1 billion to $571 million.
- April 2024. Sold to Qoo10 for $173 million.
- 2026. Still trading, now invite-only for merchants.
Because Qoo10 are privately held, they do not file the kind of annual report ContextLogic did, which is why the table above runs out where it does.
Where Wish's packaging waste comes from
Most marketplaces consolidate. Several items bought at once travel together in one box, and a large retailer's warehouse packs many orders into a single van run. Wish does neither.
Their last annual report describes the shipping model in a line. The logistics offering is "designed for direct end-to-end single order shipment from a merchant's location to the user", and merchants pay for it "on a per order basis".
So an order does not wait for anything else. It leaves the merchant's premises in its own bag, joins a postal or courier network, and crosses a border alone. Somebody buying three cheap items from three sellers generates three separate parcels.
That is what makes the total as large as it is. The goods are small and the void fill minimal, so each parcel is light, but the number of separate bags tracks the number of orders rather than the number of shoppers.
By October 2020 more than 90% of Wish packages moved through the company's own logistics platform, up from none at all in 2016. Wish handled the shipping themselves on about half of that volume, acting as a fulfilment service provider rather than only a listings site.
The economics of that model rested on cheap cross-border post. Wish told investors their merchants in China "have benefitted from lower shipping costs due to the Universal Postal Union Treaty", the agreement that sets what one country's postal service pays another to deliver its mail.
That advantage has since been withdrawn, which is the subject of the last section.
How the volume collapsed
The tonnage above tracks two numbers Wish reported every year, how many people bought something and how much money the business took.
| Year | Buyers who ordered (millions) | Revenue ($m) |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | no disclosure | no disclosure |
| 2025 | no disclosure | no disclosure |
| 2024 | no disclosure | no disclosure |
| 2023 | 7 | 287 |
| 2022 | 13 | 571 |
| 2021 | 38 | 2,085 |
| 2020 | 64 | 2,541 |
| 2019 | 62 | 1,901 |
Note: Buyers are last-twelve-months active buyers, the measure Wish used for people who placed at least one order in the previous year. Figures come from ContextLogic's annual reports for 2021 and 2023.
Between 2020 and 2023 the number of people buying on Wish fell 89%, from 64 million to 7 million, and revenue fell by almost exactly the same proportion. Monthly visitors dropped from 107 million to 11 million across the same three years.
Wish attributed most of that decline to a decision of their own. They cut digital advertising spending sharply from the third quarter of 2021, and in both annual reports that followed they name that cut as the main reason visitors and buyers fell away.
The two disclosed item counts move in step with those buyers. Wish shipped about ten items per buyer in 2020 and about nine in 2021, and that rate is what the 2022 and 2023 rows of the waste table rest on.
The day the reporting stopped
On 10 February 2024 ContextLogic agreed to sell substantially all of their assets to Qoo10. Shareholders approved the sale on 18 April, and it closed the following day.
The annual report that followed put it plainly. "Following the completion of the Asset Sale, we have exited the operation of our marketplace and logistics business and other historical operations."
ContextLogic kept about $162 million in cash and securities along with their accumulated tax losses, and carried on as a listed shell looking for a business to buy. The marketplace itself went to a private company in Singapore.
That is the point at which Wish stops being measurable from the outside. A company listed in the United States has to report how many people bought something and how much money came in, and a private Singapore one does not.
The parcels did not stop when the reporting did, because wish.com still takes orders today, but the obligation to count anything in public ended with the sale.
What Wish told investors about packaging rules
For a company that never reported a gram of packaging, Wish wrote about packaging law at some length. Their final annual report lists extended producer responsibility among the regulatory risks facing the business.
Extended producer responsibility makes whoever puts packaging on a market pay for collecting and recycling it afterwards. Wish's concern was that several countries had extended those duties to the marketplace itself, not only to the seller listing on it.
"Certain EU-27 Member States, such as France, Germany, Sweden, and Austria, have already updated their own versions of Extended Producer Responsibility ("EPR") schemes under applicable EU Directives that apply to online marketplace platforms."
What those schemes require, in the same sentence, is that platforms "collect, report, and at times publish mandatory registration or other product data from third-party sellers offering certain in-region products or packaging on their platforms".
The passage goes on to warn that failing to make sure merchants meet their own obligations "can result in civil penalties to such platforms", and that rules of this kind "are only expected to increase in breadth and number over the coming years".
A platform carrying online marketplace EPR obligations has to satisfy itself that the sellers it lists are registered where they need to be.
Wish named four countries. Two of them, Sweden and Austria, run the kind of public producer register a marketplace is expected to check its sellers against.
The filing sets out the duty to collect and report packaging data across several pages of risk factors, and reports none of their own anywhere in the document.
Where Wish stands in 2026
Two things have changed since the sale, and both matter to anyone trying to work out what Wish ships now.
The first is the platform itself. The merchant site now redirects to a page headed "Wish Invites Business Merchants to Join Our Online Marketplace".
Under that heading Wish describe themselves as "an invite-only platform where top-tier merchants can sell their products to millions of customers around the world".
The same page still advertises "over half a million merchants globally". The last annual report filed before the sale described "thousands of active global merchants". Both are quoted here as published, because there is no public basis for reconciling them.
The second is the customs rule the whole model depended on. A parcel worth less than $800 used to enter the United States duty free and with very little paperwork, which is what made it viable to post a $3 phone case from Guangdong to Ohio.
| Date | What changed for a low-value parcel entering the United States |
|---|---|
| 2 May 2025 | The $800 duty-free allowance ended for goods from China and Hong Kong |
| 29 August 2025 | It ended for every other country |
| 24 June 2026 | US Customs made the suspension indefinite and closed the postal route as well |
Note: Dates are from the US Federal Register. The 2026 change is an interim final rule from US Customs and Border Protection, published and effective on 24 June 2026.
Every low-value parcel arriving in the United States now needs a formal or informal customs entry. The arbitrage Wish was built on is closed, for Wish and for the platforms that copied the model.
For an importer or a distance seller today, the parcel that once slipped through unrecorded now arrives with a name attached to it, on the customs side and increasingly on the packaging side too.
Frequently asked questions about Wish's waste
Below are the seven questions that come up most often about Wish and the packaging their parcels created.
How much waste does Wish produce each year?
Around 1,250 tonnes in 2026, against roughly 111,000 tonnes in their biggest year, the twelve months to 30 September 2020. The 2026 figure is a projection, because Wish has disclosed nothing since the business was sold in April 2024.
Did Wish ever report a waste or emissions figure?
No. A full-text search of every ContextLogic annual report and of the IPO prospectus returns no waste tonnage, no emissions figure and no other environmental quantity, across roughly 2.1 million characters of disclosure.
How is Wish's packaging waste estimated?
Wish filed their item volumes with the SEC through 2021, and later years are scaled on their reported buyer numbers. Each parcel is costed at 174 g, the average measured across more than 8,000 Chinese express parcels.
How many parcels did Wish ship at their peak?
Wish told investors they shipped over 640 million items in the twelve months to 30 September 2020, around 1.8 million a day. That is an item count, and Wish never published how many separate parcels those items travelled in.
Who owns Wish now?
Wish is owned by Qoo10, a privately held Singapore company that bought substantially all of Wish's assets for $173 million in a sale that closed on 19 April 2024. ContextLogic, the original listed company, kept the cash and became a shell.
Is Wish still operating in 2026?
Yes, wish.com still takes orders. The merchant side has changed, though, and Wish now describe themselves as an invite-only platform rather than the open marketplace that once signed up sellers directly.
Did Wish have to follow EPR rules?
Yes, and they said so themselves. Their final annual report names EPR schemes in France, Germany, Sweden and Austria that place registration and reporting duties on marketplaces, and warns that failing to police sellers can bring civil penalties.
Images: Minesweeper
