The China Environmental Protection Foundation and Meituan Takeaway established a special fund named “Green Hill” in order to promote the comprehensive conservation and recycling of resources and to build green supply chains in the takeaway industry. As an active response to the plastics ban policies in China, the partners launched an innovative incubation project in May 2020 to select novel paper-based packaging products for further funding and support. The innovative formed fiber products by Stora Enso China Packaging eventually won the competition and ranked first through expert evaluation and on-site inspection.
The formed fiber food packaging product does not contain any plastics and can fully meet the performance requirements of food packaging such as safety, water resistance, and oil resistance. It also holds superior environmental properties as being renewable, recyclable, and biodegradable. Additionally, takeaway orders can be delivered with this solution without using plastic. The food container was designed to be easily stacked, while ropes or carton board handles can be used for handling during delivery.
Founded in 2013, Meituan Takeaway is one of the world's leading on-demand food service providers and is one of the largest online takeaway platforms in China. In 2018, Meituan Takeaway's business could deliver more than 14 million orders daily all across China. With over 600,000 delivery staff in China, its transaction amount reaches RMB 282.8 billion annually. The “Green Hill” project by Meituan Takeaway focuses on environmental protection areas, including concept advocacy, research, science-based closed-loop recycling, and environmental public welfare promotion. In the past three years, this project has helped to integrate resources focused on the entire takeaway industry chain. It has cooperated with the upstream and downstream partners to find green development solutions and accelerate the environmental protection progress of the industry.
Next, Stora Enso and Meituan will strengthen their in-depth cooperation in the field of green takeaway packaging and jointly advance R&D and promotion of sustainable packaging materials. Meituan has selected a batch of merchants from its platform who will receive 100,000 formed fiber food containers from Stora Enso to replace plastic boxes. The first phase of the plan is to cover more than 100 merchants in over 15 provinces, and it will reach more regions and consumers in the future.
This cooperation is strong evidence of Stora Enso's great efforts and strength in supporting sustainable consumption and promoting circular economy as the renewable materials company. "Continued innovation to address the needs of our customers and consumers is one of the key strategies of Stora Enso in China,” says Aaron Yu, Country Manager China & SVP, Stora Enso. “We will increase R&D investment in our products and production processes, further expand our production scale of formed fiber products, and work with upstream and downstream partners to deliver safer, neater, more convenient, and more environmental food packaging solutions to Chinese consumers, so as to build a healthy and circular industry and society."
