Case 19. We call for the "E-commerce Law" to Consider Biodiversity Conservation - the Embodiment of Ecological Civilization

Since China became one of the first batch of countries in the world to approve the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, biodiversity has gradually become an important part of building an ecological civilization, realizing beautiful China, and fulfilling social responsibilities and achieving sustainable development and earns more and more public attentions. After people began to pay attention to a series of environmental and biodiversity issues brought about by development, the industrial development, transportation and other infrastructure construction, tourism, poverty alleviation and other development areas have incorporated ecological environment and biodiversity conservation into the range of the legislation.

We recommend that consumers' green choices be reflected in e-commerce responsibilities. The booming of e-commerce has had an increasingly profound impact on society. Take the sale as an example: According to the latest data from 2018, the daily order volume of China's major takeaway platforms has reached 32 million single orders. If consumers are not allowed to choose "I don't want disposable tableware" and disposable tableware, napkins, and plastic bags are used as defaults, then the "inaction" of e-commerce will bring environmental pollution to the objective consequences, and the unnecessary waste of forest resources is enormous in quantity and scale.

We call for the environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the e-commerce platforms. We have encountered many challenging cases in our work, such as: e-commerce has introduced the global endangered species bluefin tuna, video platform broadcasts to teach people how to cook endangered species pangolin, search engines’ introducing the endangered species yellow-breasted bunting. The e-commerce platform sells the annual exhaust gas inspection cheating artifact "Fire Lotus", sells mesh net bird nets, illegal electric fishing equipment. The popular take-out e-platforms and express delivery platforms’ over-packaging and inaction of environment pollution phenomenon... What is the environmental corporate social responsibility of the e-commerce platform? We believe that the new law should include the spirit of the existing law, but it has not yet been covered. Because of the rapid emergence and rapid development of e-commerce, the new law must be predictive and capable of guiding the future.

By / Niu Jingmei