Waste from China’s e-commerce and express delivery sectors is set to quadruple by the year 2025, unless drastic action is taken to curb it. Contributing factors include the volume of packaging material used, and also specific days when shopping and spending spike (such as ‘Singles’ Day’).

Due to pollutants emerging on the edge of the Tengger Desert in China, the country’s top environmental watchdog has been dispatched to investigate the issue further. Over 40,000 metric tonnes of pollutants have been scoured and sealed up as part of efforts to clean the area.

Air quality targets in China have been eased, and Beijing is getting ready to endure smog over winter skies – a signal that the Chinese government is focusing on economic growth at the expense of clean air. China is now aiming for a 4% drop in the concentrations of polluting particles in the relevant period, in contrast to the original target of 5.5%.

This article references the fact that the leader of India’s BJP party has blamed neighbours China and Pakistan for pollution issues in northern India, with pollutants allegedly crossing the border into India.

The Wall Street Journal has published an article directly correlating China’s high smog levels to its successful economy writing that the pollution reflects particular parts of the economy especially the housing driven heavy industry sector. However whilst this sector has not been so successful recently, China’s air pollution data shows that the smog is lower than usual.

Despite showing real progress increasing use of renewable energy, China is still depending heavily on coal to power its ever growing manufacturing-based economy. In the past eight years alone, China has used more coal than the rest of the world combined.

In his remarks to the annual conference of the Valdai Club this autumn, President Vladimir Putin managed simultaneously to cast doubt on whether human-driven climate change is actually happening, and to assure his audience that Russia is doing everything possible to prevent it. This is also very close to the contradictory public positions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

Climate policy is dangling between the cynicism of Donald Trump and the radicalism of Greta Thunberg. The US president has just pulled the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases out of the Paris climate accord. Ms Thunberg demands significantly more than a 50 per cent cut in global net emissions by 2030. The former is certainly irresponsible. But the latter seems inconceivable.

A study whose findings have been published in Nature Sustainability journal have found that bilateral trade between China and the US accounts for 2.5% of world shipping CO2 emissions. Worse still, this trading relationship alone causes 4.8% of premature deaths from shipping air pollution emissions.

Authorities in the Hebei Province of Northern China decided to issue an Orange pollution alert on October 30th, in anticipation of high air pollution levels predicted for November 1st. The article also references how pollution levels have markedly increased in certain areas of southern China, including Anhui, Canton, Fujian, and Jiangsu.