Covid Supercharged the World’s Takeout Habit and Left a Big Mess

Food delivery workers have been praised as heroes for keeping society nourished during the pandemic. But the downside to all that convenience has been a massive pileup of waste.

Take the world’s biggest online meal delivery market, China, where on-demand giant Meituan fulfilled 40 million meal orders on a single day in August. Meal delivery has grown into a $51.5 billion industry in China, according to researchers at New Zealand’s University of Otago. In 2013, the year Meituan got started, Chinese consulting company iiMedia Research estimated the market was just 50.2 billion yuan ($7.63 billion). Meanwhile, say the researchers, the country’s volume of packaging waste grew from 0.2 million metric tons in 2015 to 1.5 million metric tons in 2017.