In the countdown to this year's Singles Day (Nov 11) shopping extravaganza, some online retailers are playing the "low-carbon" and "green" cards.
On Oct 27, Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall launched a special "green retail window", the first such sales platform in the Singles Day's 13-year history.

The same day, Suning Online launched its first recycling week and saw inquiries about trade-in business going up by more than 300 percent and orders increasing by 153 percent year-on-year.

Another e-commerce platform, JD, is using new energy logistics vehicles and exploring a zero-carbon storage possibility through distributed solar power generation.

In the past, China paid attention to energy conservation and emissions reduction in high energy-consumption industries such as steel and cement.
But with the rapid development of the digital economy, internet enterprises have become big energy consumers. Their carbon emissions mostly come from the electricity consumed at their data and cloud computing centers.

In the era of big data, cloud computing and the internet of things, global information data will see explosive growth, pushing up energy demand.
Decarbonization of the internet industry undoubtedly has to be an important part of China's efforts to reduce carbon emissions, as it has vowed to peak its emissions before 2030 and realize carbon neutrality before 2060.

The increasing energy demand and carbon emissions by internet enterprises, however, will pose a major challenge to meeting those goals.

In this sense, the Singles Day retail gala is not only a shopping festival, but also a carbon emission-reduction test for internet enterprises.

Digital infrastructure can facilitate low-carbon transformation, and internet companies can realize higher-quality development by reducing their carbon emissions.

- Economic Daily

By using renewable energy and following the low-carbon development path, the internet enterprises will not only promote sustainable development, but can also avoid long-term business risks.