JD.com’s Winning Battles for Green Economy

by Siyi Zhao and Yuchuan Wang

JD.com has announced that it will reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, comparing with 2019. At the same time, JD will collaborate with partners to build the largest rooftop photovoltaic (PV) power generation ecosystem by 2030.

Currently, JD has already finished installing the first of PV power generation systems at 12 intelligent industrial parks, in which the PV system of Shanghai's Asia No.1 park can generate 3.11 million kWh per year for the office during the daytime and new energy vehicles (NEVs) at night.

According to the calculation, the total production capacity of JD's PV power generation system will be 100 megawatts by the end of 2021, which could provide energy for 50,000 households in a year. And in three years, the capacity will reach 1000 megawatts, contributing green energy to 85% of JD's intelligent industrial parks.

Also, the PV power generation and other implementations allow logistics equipment to operate in the dark, thus significantly reducing energy consumption. Based on tests, 2283 kWh could be saved under such a model each minute, the same amount of energy one household consumes in one and a half years.

Apart from utilizing green energy, JD's e-commerce platform also has a massive 150 million items of green-consumption merchandises. Directed by smart promotion towards these products, JD is cutting nearly 2 million tons of carbon emissions per year through the selling of top tier energy-efficient air-conditioners, refrigerators, and TVs.

JD continues efforts to build green data centers. The data centers powering this year's Singles Day Grand Promotion have a low power usage effectiveness (PUE) at 1.1. It helps save energy by 30%, and reduces carbon emissions by 10%. Advanced technologies such as liquid cooling and heating recovery, AI smart temperature control, robot inspection and more are applied in JD's data centers.

The tremendous number of delivery packages is no doubt the biggest factor for consumption. And starting from 6 years ago, JD has already researched and taken innovative action on reducing the amount of tape and packages. By cutting the breadth of tape from 53 mm to 45 mm, JD has accomplished the goal of reducing the use of 400 million meters of tape in 2020, an amount which can circle the equator ten times. Meanwhile, it has also reduced the consumption of 13,000 tons of paper by applying the paperless operation inside the warehouses. In the last four years, in over 30 cities across the country, JD has launched Green Stream Boxes, which are made of recyclable materials and have no need for packing tape, and can be reused more than 50 times.

Transportation is vital to carbon reduction, which is an important part that JD has invested in improving. Last month, JD Logistics announced that in next five years it will invest RMB 1 billion yuan in its green supply chain project. It expects its carbon efficiency to be increased by 35%.
In the past four years, JD Logistics applied nearly 12,000 new energy vehicles in more than 50 cities in China, with over 1,600 charging terminals, reducing at least 120,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. In Beijing, all of JD's 1P delivery vehicles have been replaced by such new energy ones.

In addition, JD leverages digital technologies to optimize the warehousing network and transporting routes to reduce daytime on-road vehicles, improve their loading rate and decrease the waiting time.

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