We caught up with Ning Yang, CEO from Kunshan Zhiyang Machinery Technology, who will attend next month's E-PACK Asia event. Read on to hear his thoughts on the key development changes and opportunities in e-commerce packaging.

Q. What are the key development changes have you seen in e-commerce packaging and supply chain over the past 5 years?
1. More standardized packaging: Such as Hive Self-Pickup and Drop-Off Box; The prices of packaging materials have been rising: Non-recyclable materials are reduced, and gradually replaced by recyclable materials.
2. E-commerce supply chain services have become a new trend: The epidemic has led to the exponential growth of the public's demand for e-commerce, and the domestic packaging supply chain is highly integrated, and several huge supply chain companies have emerged, such as SF Express, YTO, ZTO, etc.
3. The transformation of e-commerce logistics to e-commerce supply chain: The green practice of e-commerce logistics packaging takes green, reduction and recycling as the main breakthrough point, the electronic waybill has basically achieved universal application, effectively controlling the secondary packaging rate of e-commerce packages, and the recyclable packaging boxes have been explored and promoted in some e-commerce logistics enterprises, and the scope of use has been gradually increased in multiple scenarios, multiple categories, and multiple paths.

Q. From your perspective, what are the key factors that contributed to this development changes?
Key factors include: 1. Government policy: Eight departments jointly promote the "green, reduced and recyclable" express packaging — with the green standard of express packaging, "carbon neutrality", as the strategic goal of the new era, has been accepted by more and more people.
2. Environmental innovation technology: the environmental protection technology innovation of e-commerce packaging promotes green life and production, reduces & prohibits the use of plastic products, and reduces carbon emissions.

Q. In your opinion, what challenges do the e-commerce packaging industry as a whole still need to overcome as a priority? What are some of the greatest opportunities?
Challenges in the e-commerce packaging industry:

• Price war: The prices of environmentally friendly materials such as paper products and degradable materials are generally high;
• Unemployment rate: The advancement of technological and intelligent reforms has led to significant reductions in the labor force.

The greatest opportunity facing:

• Electronic packaging has been widely accepted: For ordinary consumers, online shopping has become normal; for enterprises, the logistics industry is affected by the oil price, personnel wages, land, etc., and e-commerce packaging has gradually become the dependence on its survival and development, which lays the foundation of the user base for the in-depth development of e-commerce packaging in the future.

Q. In the next 5 years, what trends and developments do you think will redefine the e-commerce packaging industry?

• More refined: E-commerce packaging will be extended to all aspects of our real life;
• More diversified: E-commerce packaging will break the dominant trend of foreign e-commerce packaging industry in the future.
• More intelligent: The development and innovation of e-commerce packaging technology can undoubtedly bring about the fundamental changes of applications.

Q. What speech topics are you most looking forward to hearing at the upcoming E-commerce Packaging Asia Summit?
​I am most looking forward to hearing about innovation in corrugated packaging and flexible packaging and supply chain collaboration in the green e-commerce packaging and logistics environment.