Team:HUBU-Wuhan/Intergrated Human Practices

• Home
• Team
  • Team Members
  • Attributions
  • Collaborations
• Project
  • Description
  • Design
  • Experiments
  • Results
• Parts
  • Part Table
  • Improve
• Notebook
  • Calendar
  • Protocol
• Human Practices
  • Human Practices
  • Intergrated Human Practices
  • Education& Engagement
• Contribution
  • InterLab
  • Safety
  • Model

Integrated Human Practice

    Due to the fast expansion of online retail business, excessive paper delivery boxes now cause a social and environmental problem. For example, the Double 11 & Singles' Day Global Shopping Festival in China could generate more than 165 million paper packages in one week. In 2017, more than 40 billion express packages were delivered in China, with half of them were paper cartons. It was noticed that China has contributed more than half of the world's express delivery growth, and is ranked as the first in the world in the paper carton usage for the last four years.

    In China, courier operators can operate on different scales, ranging from specific towns to regional, transnational, and even global services. All the major global express delivery companies, including DHL International Express, UPS Express, FedEx, and TNT Express, operate business in China. At the same time, China oriented express delivery agencies companies, such as Zhongtong Express, Shunfeng Express, Yuantong Express, Baishi Express, etc., are mainly operating the express delivery business inside China. As a developing country, recylcling system of paper cartons in China is still inperfect. It’s easy to find different types of paper boxes by the trash can, on the roadside in the campus, or in the express stations. In this human practice, we investigated the ZhonTong and ShunFeng express stations in the campus of the Hubei University to further understand the problems raised by excessive paper cartons.

“Zhong Tong” express station （A）， “Shun Feng” express station （B）

1: How many packages do you receive each day?

    In normal times, “Zhongtong Express” probably receives about 1,300 packages every day. During the holiday seasons and shooping festival such as the “Double 11 shopping festival”, more than 2,000 packages will be delivered in a single day. To the same question, “Shentong Express” said that probably more than 800 packages were delived every day. Since there are 7 different express stations in the campus, it could be estimated that more than 7,000 packages were delivered in the campus each day, and halo of them are paper cartons.

2: How do students handle the cartons after receiving the packages?

    A small portion of students open the packages immediately by the express station and return the paper cartons. Most students took the packages back to the dormitory, and the paper cartons were mostly treated as normal trash.

3: How do you deal with the cartons that students unpack on the spot?

    We collect those courier boxes together. The cartons reaching the re-using requirements will be reused, and the damaged cartons will be sent to the Waste Recycling Station.

    Based on our investigation, the frequency of paper carton recycling is low in campus, and the discarded cartons around the campus do cause environmental problem. It is no doubt that converting the paper cartons into fermentable sugar to produce renewable biofuels will provide an alternative strategy to solve this practical problem.