China's e-commerce giant Alibaba initiated its 2020 Green Logistics project on all of its platforms last week, vowing to ensure all its bags are biodegradable and all cartons can be recycled by 2020.

It is reported the other e-commerce and logistics companies will also follow suit.

Statistics shows that express enterprises handled a total of 40.06 billion deliveries last year, up 28 percent year-on-year, which consumed 19.2 billion cartons, 5.8 billion woven bags, 15 billion plastic bags and more than 30 billion meters of packaging tape.

It is good that the companies are taking the initiative to deal with the issue, but they should actually have done so from the very beginning.

The State Post Bureau issued a plan on advancing green packaging in the express delivery industry in August, and three months later 10 ministerial-level departments jointly issued a guideline to accelerate the work.

But the authorities still need to draw up a national standard for green logistics, which can help dock different enterprises' practices and systems with each other.

The standards, if well made and implemented, could prompt enterprises to strengthen their cooperation on the research and development of new technology and models to boost the environmental friendliness of their services.