
Returned online purchases often sent to landfill - pwg
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/it-s-pretty-staggering-returned-online-purchases-often-sent-to-landfill-journalist-s-research-reveals-1.5393806
======
jacquesm
It's much worse than that. There are so many things that are manufactured
simply to be discarded it is amazing. 100's of millions of tons of stuff get
thrown away every year whose only purpose in life was to be tossed or in the
very best of cases to be recycled.

And then there is the endless stream of stuff that people gift each other
because they are clueless about what a real gift would be like but they still
want to give something. Terrible toys, terrible tools (break on first use) and
cargo cult merchandise looking like the real thing but actually being just
that: an image of the real thing.

~~~
jodrellblank
_they are clueless about what a real gift would be like_

What would a real gift be like?

~~~
faissaloo
A real gift is something handcrafted and unique.

~~~
Freak_NL
A unique handcrafted item becomes clutter when it isn't something the
recipient will use. Compared with store-bought gifts it comes with the added
drawback of being unique, and thus very awkward to dispose of to someone who
would use it.

Handcrafted and unique is fine, but suitability is much more important.

------
crazygringo
First of all, there are _zero_ hard numbers here. Are we talking about 50% of
returns being sent to landfills, or 1%? How does it compare with unsold
merchandise? Or against waste from packaging, or disposible products in
general like plastic water bottles? And even if a lot of returns aren't resold
-- how many are still donated vs. discarded? It's completely unclear if this
is really a priority to focus on or a distraction from bigger problems.

It's certainly not universal because where I shop online, I often see a
size+color briefly come "back in stock" because it had sold out but one was
returned. I've snagged desired items a few times that way -- and seen it go
back out of stock after my order went through because it really was the only
one left.

But second... the article isn't suggesting a clear solution here. You can't
tell people to just keep the items they don't want, because there's no way to
verify they're telling the truth, so you _have_ to make them ship items back.
For high-value items that are guaranteed to sell, it always makes economic
sense to hire someone to inspect and restock the items. But for low-value
items where it actually costs more to inspect and restock than the item is
wholesale, it's just rational business.

I don't think the issue here is returns, it's waste period. The full
environmental cost of producing and disposing of products needs to be included
in original retail prices. Then, companies will be rationally incentivized to
re-sell or donate items rather than dispose of them.

~~~
morsch
In Germany, according to one study, approximately 4% of returns are destroyed.
12 to 16% items are returned in the first place. On the one hand, the
resulting overall quota is very low, on the other hand that's still a very
large number in absolute terms (19 _million_ items).

Source: [https://www.zeit.de/2019/25/retouren-amazon-onlinehandel-
mue...](https://www.zeit.de/2019/25/retouren-amazon-onlinehandel-
muellproduktion-paketversand)

------
rjkennedy98
I work in returns at a very large e-tail company, and there are a few things
that should be mentioned here:

1\. Shipping damages are a huge reason why items have to be junked. Cardboard
boxes are not meant to last long. Its rare for an item to go through more than
a few shipments without needing to be completely re-boxed. I wish everyone
could see the boxes that get sent back to our returns warehouses, sometimes
you'd think these boxes have been purposefully destroyed.

2\. Luxury brands are very strict about re-sale of items on discount sites.
The explicitly prevent companies from re-selling their items on clearance.

3\. Items do get sent to charity.

4\. There is a huge cost involved in processing returns which means that items
that could be re-sold often get junked or liquidated. Its great in theory to
talk about re-selling used jackets, but someone has to process that item, ship
that item, and buy that item at a cost that makes it worth it. Warehouse space
is limited. Why would I use that space to keep used goods, when I can keep
items that will make me more profit.

~~~
ken
Re #1: I've bought electronics like this on eBay for 1/3 the price of a new
one. The box looks like someone tried to play hockey with it but the item
inside is perfectly fine. If electronics can survive, clothing and other items
certainly can.

#2 sounds plausible, but there are only so many luxury brands in the world. I
bet lots of companies want to believe that they're luxury brands, and destroy
returned merchandise to attempt to maintain this, but really aren't.

Re #4: How can we make it worth it? Couldn't they just drop a bunch of
returned products on a pallet, and sell the lot for a fixed price? There's
plenty of sellers on eBay/Craigslist with seemingly infinite time to sort and
resell items like this. I bet if any clothing store in the city posted "$250
for 1 cubic meter of the latest returned clothing items from the internet,
unspecified quality/quantity, you pick up", it'd be gone in an hour, every
time.

~~~
wiseleo
That’s commonly done. There are players like bulq.com who cater to eBay
sellers who buy pallets of returns untested and unseen.

~~~
chihuahua
I read that there are multiple Youtube channels by people who buy these
pallets and resell the individual items

------
hprotagonist
This is a good chance to plug for
[https://wornwear.patagonia.com/](https://wornwear.patagonia.com/)

 _Worn Wear is Patagonia 's hub for keeping gear in play.

Why extend the life of gear? Because the best thing we can do for the planet
is cut down on consumption and get more use out of stuff we already own.

Join us to repair, share and recycle your gear._

AIUI, online returns that are slightly mangled and in store returns that
aren’t quite like-new are also sold here, as well as serviceable but old
clothes you can exchange.

NB you can also perpetually repair most patagonia clothes, for free. They do
most repairs in contract with local tailors, and have a central repair shop
for bigger jobs, so they keep money in the neighborhood and also cut way down
on shipping emissions.

~~~
fny
So, these aren't really "worn" correct? At first, I assumed the inventory was
thrift and my jaw dropped when I saw the prices. They should consider
rebranding...

~~~
rjsw
The company isn't known as Patagucci for nothing.

~~~
hprotagonist
for now, anyway, the clothes are worth the price.

$150 for a hoodie layer (R1) i’ve repaired 5 times and had for a decade
amortizes out to a pretty fair price.

And they have an excellent culture. Employees get voting days off, they’re
closed on black friday, they do loads of good sponsorship and support for
outdoor sports, they’re happy to spend on conservation efforts...

I’d rather give them my money than many other companies.

------
kevsim
> Why won't companies give the clothes to charities?

> It's an image thing. They're trying to maintain exclusivity.

We’ve reached a pretty dismal place as a society where a company would rather
burn their wares than to have a person in need get them.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Clothing is the bottom of the heap for donations. Our church rumble sale, we
ban donated clothes. Nobody buys them; they go to the dump.

~~~
anigbrowl
Why don't you just give them to poor people? You know,for free?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
As I said, nobody wants them. Nobody comes in for them, no matter what the
price.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't know where your church is but individual homeless people may not be
able to trek around town to visit one of your rumble sales or even know that
they're taking place. Perhaps sorting for durability and insulation (rather
than fashion value) and driving around with a pickup asking people if they
need warm clothes would be a more effective approach.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Feel free. The point is, the clothes are not the issue. Its the effort it
takes. There are places that do that (Salvation Army etc) and they have
absolutely no trouble getting clothes.

------
coldcode
Like this is anything new. Monte Testaccio is an artificial hill in Rome
composed almost entirely of broken and abandoned pottery. A huge amount of
effort and cost went into creating amphorae elsewhere to ship stuff in (often
olive oil) which was then worthless for reuse so it was tossed out. Today we
have a lot more things to toss out, but the economics is similar. It's often
cheaper to throw away than to ship it elsewhere. I always wonder how much
packing material alone is tossed out.

------
JoeAltmaier
Clothing - I'm not getting excited about this. Every year, every big game,
there're T-shirts printed with the winning team, before the game. So they
print two versions. The team that doesn't win, their T-shirt is bundled up and
put on a cargo ship in enormous bales and sent to someplace overseas where
they sell for a penny or two. Or for fuel, or for the cotton to recycle.

Clothes are often made in large automated factories. Insisting some human
beings manually examine, clean, press and repackage clothing to avoid 'waste'
is the opposite of a good idea. Its enormous cost to the economy, and
indirectly to the environment.

~~~
lnsru
“Clothes are often made in large automated factories” <\- are you sure about
this? Normally clothes for all brands are manufactured manually in cheap labor
countries ignoring all safety and environmental factors except few luxury
local brands.

------
dredmorbius
This makes an interesting counterpoint to "Confessions of a Book Pirate
(2010)".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786747)

Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed less
acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers, deliberately
destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.

~~~
esotericn
> Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed
> less acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers,
> deliberately destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.

By whom? I don't think this is true at all.

It's less acceptable to the sellers of said goods, not to society at large.

The legal system doesn't represent the will of the people in all cases; in the
case of copyright law it's quite obviously weighted more towards representing
the will of money.

~~~
coding123
No one would want to create content. So in a backwards way, we want content,
so it's our will to have copyright law. If you can suggest another way we can
have shows like Dexter I think you should speak up.

~~~
esotericn
I think that the society with no copyright law is better, so I'd give up
Dexter for it.

It's erroneous to just picture the same world with paid media missing and
nothing else sprouting up.

~~~
clarry
Indeed, and I think that those who want Dexter should figure something out
between themselves and whoever can produce Dexter for them, instead of
imposing laws that affect everyone in the country or world (including those
who want to have nothing to do with Dexter).

I'm sure if enough people want Dexter and are willing to pay for it, they'll
get it, even without copyright law.

~~~
asciident
> I'm sure if enough people want Dexter and are willing to pay for it, they'll
> get it, even without copyright law.

This seems like an overly naive way of thinking, see Prisoner's Dilemma as a
starting point.

------
acangiano
We, as a society, really need to stop being so laissez-faire when it comes to
unnecessary waste. Laws might be required for actual change to happen. Like
French grocery stores having to donate excess food rather than throwing it
away.

~~~
clarry
Last week I took a pause during my grocery shopping to grab and eat a banana
inside the store. They had a bin you can eat from; that's where they put the
produce that's looking old or battered and would soon have to be discarded
anyway.

I was super hungry, and grateful for that banana. A man with two kids also
grabbed some for the young ones.

It's a small thing and probably doesn't achieve much in the end but I really
like the idea.

Packaged food is sold at a discount near its expiry date.

------
Havoc
Yup - that's why I try to shop on Amazon's warehouse/open box site first. 90%
of the time it's brand new stuff anyway that someone sent back on a whim.

The fact that it's cheaper helps too

~~~
rahimnathwani
I try to do the same, and am usually happy, but:

\- recently the price difference on many items isn't worth the risk (e.g. a
saving of 5% off the regular price)

\- sometimes you receive an item that someone has fraudulently returned (e.g.
someone has an old broken item, buy a new one from Amazon, and return the old
one pretending they just changed their mind); I had this happen once for an
expensive item ($600), and the original return slip was still in the box. It
was obvious that the item returned had been used for quite some time, and
didn't work.

\- the items don't seem to be checked too well: I recently received an item
which was missing an essential part

Still, Amazon's return process is great when they're at fault, so overall it's
still worth it.

~~~
Havoc
Yeah it is a roll of the dice.

Recently purchased an older zenbook this way and it has clearly seen some use
(and battery was dead). Still happy though since the similarly priced netbooks
I was looking at were garbage spec'd.

------
paulgerhardt
Manufacturer's perspective. If you're looking for business opportunities,
something with a huge schlep blindness quotient[1], if you love adversarial
thinking, then you'll love 'Reverse Logistics'. Also maybe if you're a
politician looking to score some jobs for your district.

The basic economic lever is simple with implications that go far: it costs
more to process a returned good than the value one could accrue from reselling
it because returned goods need to be processed three times while regular goods
only need to be processed once. If 3% of your shipped goods are returned you
are making a healthy profit. If 10% are returned you are breaking even. If 20%
are returned you are going under. Goods are usually manufactured at 25% their
retail cost and businesses have overhead that profit needs to cover.

A lot of the return cost is additional labor and shipping. If you can minimize
transport (sort returns at local factories/DCs rather than shipping back to
China) and minimize cost of processing returns with low-skill labor (say
supplementing with high resolution cameras/scales/machine learning inspection
by comparing your 'returned' good against thousands of known good versions of
your good) one could tackle this. Laws would help in that they would force
product designers to push to more assembly and less fabrication steps and
fewer steps overall.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

------
burlesona
The entire story fits in the subhead: Cheaper for businesses to just toss
returns than check if they can be resold.

The easiest way to change that would be to make disposal more expensive. Start
a land filling tax (and/or a carbon tax, which would hit incinerators), and
suddenly a lot of these businesses would run the numbers and say “never mind,
let’s actually process the returns.” Or alternatively they’d say, “hmm we
can’t make free shipping free returns work anymore,” which I think is also
fine.

------
madengr
Shows you how much the stuff actually costs to manufacture when it is just
thrown away. Probably just sweatshop labor costs and shipping.

~~~
iguy
Yup. Clothing has been a famously high-margin business since long before the
internet, though. Like > 70% margins being normal for department stores, IIRC.

Which does not imply the rest is profit, of course (since all the competing
stores do the same). More like that they threw half of it out at the end of
the season.

~~~
madengr
I buy pants at Costco. Their $20 Kirkland brand pants last for years. JC Penny
used to have a factory outlet here where I could buy XXLT polos for $6. I
bought several years worth before they shut down.

My wife has an embroidery machine, so I get custom shirts. I have a yellow,
red, and blue set of polos with Star Trek insignias, a Smith Chart, radio
circuits, etc.

~~~
iguy
Yea I bet those don't have 70% margins. I also bet you know which size to buy
when you go back the next year, instead of having to figure out again what
shape everybody is making jeans this year.

------
falcolas
A good topic to post a contentious viewpoint on:

This is simply an extension of the current "a company exists only to bring
shareholders profit" viewpoint. Why resell returned purchases when it's
cheaper to destroy them and claim a tax break on them?

Why sell robust toys, tools, clothing, etc. when it's cheaper to sell
expensive pieces of "minimum viable product" that needs to be replaced every
year.

Even when the cost is an unsustainable long-term business (not to mention
long-term environmental and social impact), so long as the executives and
shareholders profit from their short-term investment in the company they all
shrug their shoulders and move on to the next ephemeral business.

Do you remember when you were regarded as a customer by a big brand - as an
equal who had a relationship with that brand - instead of a consumer? It's
been a long time for me.

------
gok
The core problem here is really "free" returns. There's a nasty feedback loop:
consumers return things more often, so sellers make items junkier and junkier
because their margins keep shrinking.

~~~
skizm
With clothes and shoes though, I won’t even consider buying if there are no
free returns. The sizing is too different from brand to brand.

~~~
gok
That's fine, just be aware that a good portion of what you're paying goes to
making and shipping "wrong size" clothes that will typically end up getting
thrown away immediately.

------
acroback
The amount of wastage I see in online store returns is mind boggling.

I recently ordered something from a manufacturer on Amazon. After couple of
days, they dropped price on product by $20. So I called up Amazon for price
adjustment. I was politely asked to return it to manufacturer and order a new
one.

Seriously, Amazon cannot work with manufacturers to just refund price
difference instead of returning the product and ordering it again. It is
wasteful at so many levels.

~~~
crazygringo
Price adjustments are actually a fascinating area.

Because on the one hand, anyone can get a "de facto" price adjustment by
buying a new one, keeping the old one, and returning the new one _as_ the old
one.

Now if consumers all actually did this and shipping were offered free for
consumers, you'd see every company offering price adjustments within the
return window, just so they could save on the shipping and handling they'd
otherwise be paying for.

But in reality, a lot of consumers won't go through the hassle because it's
not worth it in the end, or just too annoying. In that case, a company can
save a lot more money by not offering price adjustments -- clearly Amazon's
strategy here.

The most profitable strategy for any particular company on any particular
product category can be either of these or somewhere in the middle. Which is
why, even for companies that offer price adjustments, they're often predicated
on a shorter time window (1 week instead of 60 days), only being on
merchandise that was originally full-price (so you can go from 0% discount to
40%, but not 20% to 40%), or other exclusions which result in the most
profitable overall balance.

It's kind of fun stuff to get into, actually.

------
carapace
Just to point out, all the technology needed to do something better is already
worked out. We just need social/political will (or whatever) to fully
implement it. We have e.g. biodegradable or reusable plastic, etc., and could
make all these items in a sustainable way.

The bigger challenge is converting our systems. E.g. Here in San Francisco our
water comes from Hetch Hetchy about 200 miles away. There is very little
public awareness (yet) that this is the kind of thing that will have to change
if we're going to live in harmony with Nature.

I've been toying with the idea of trying to create a new town somewhere along
holistic lines but personally I'm a recluse and I don't actually want to deal
with the social stuff that would entail.

So instead, I'm building robots that can arrange and glue small pieces of
material together to create larger laminated/aggregated building material.
(Image search "timbrel vault"[1] and imagine little spidery machines making
those out of irregular bits of {wood,metal,plastic,etc} placed and aligned
with CV+ML. Or consider the agglutinated shells of certain amoebae[2].)

I imagine a sort of distributed inside-out factory that "eats" landfill and
"poops" new resources.

(I just got my servos yesterday!)

[1]
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timbrel+vault&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iax...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timbrel+vault&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iax=images&ia=images)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testate_amoebae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testate_amoebae)

------
someonehere
I bought a Casper mattress when they first came to market. My SO and I needed
a new mattress and decided we would take them up on their 90 day return offer.

After the second night, my SO complained her neck was hurting so we contacted
the return people. They said they would send someone to pick up the mattress
from us.

Next day a 1800 Junk showed up and the guys threw it in the back. Essentially
after two days of use it went in the landfill (I assume). So I learned to be
skeptical of offers of free returns on items that touch the body.

In the end we found that the NovaFoam mattress from Costco was better for us
and it was less expensive.

------
barrkel
Costs of production, for things likes clothes especially, are very cheap; the
value is in marketing and branding. With fashion, what you buy is effectively
a tag that lets you cash in on some of the cachet of the brand's advertising
spend and the image it portrays.

The actual goods are very secondary, and are increasingly poor quality.
Designer shirts I buy these days rip in the elbows and fray at the collar in
less than 40 wears or so; jeans wear through at the knee at around the 100 day
mark.

I would be surprised if materials and labour for production exceeded £10 on a
typical £100 shirt or jeans.

------
rb808
Many items in the <$30 price range will cost a lot of money to ship it back,
let alone the time and effort to process at both ends. Its more efficient just
to give away or even throw away yourself, but returning gives you a credit so
that is what most people do.

------
terrycody
No rude or discriminate, but I think it would be much better to send these
returns to the 3rd party countries like India or China, isn't it a win-win
solution?

------
t34543
Better than being resold - with rampant return fraud these items can be sold
as new and cost 3 shipping trips to make it right.

------
Red_Leaves_Flyy
Time for the bay to disrupt online returns?

~~~
jacquesm
That's already happened in some places:
[https://www.buybay.com/](https://www.buybay.com/)

------
airnomad
Just gift people books.

------
zmzrr
>Amazon has faced accusations of destroying returned items in both France and
Germany.

...and? Is this where we are going, I can't do whatever the fuck I want with
the stuff I own?

~~~
esotericn
You can do whatever you want.

Other people are free to have opinions of you.

Destroying something that someone could use is a dick move.

~~~
zmzrr
If you click the links you will see they want to outlaw it.

~~~
esotericn
They'll be socially punished for doing so, but they can still do it. No-one is
going to prison over this.

We're talking about a businesses' practices, not an individual.

~~~
zmzrr
I insist that you read the link:

[https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/amazon-france-under-fire-
for...](https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/amazon-france-under-fire-for-
destroying-unsold-goods-1.4252787)

~~~
esotericn
Could you explain how it is not consistent with what I've said?

Also, what's the deal with posting an entirely different link?

