How returning online purchases is bad for the environment

The convenience of online shopping is unrivaled. Consumers can order everything from apparel and electronics to furniture and groceries with the reassurance that if they don’t

like it, they can send it back in exchange for a refund. Risk-averse shoppers are relieved by open-ended return policies, but what happens to all of those returned products? You

might assume that unused items are inspected and repackaged, then put back onto store and warehouse shelves, but that’s far from the reality of how retailers operate. In a linear

supply chain, products are designed to leave the store, not to be brought back. According to a 2021 survey of 300 retailers, less than half of returned items can be resold at full

price and many companies do not have the internal logistics to sort, investigate and repackage returns. At best, returns are sold by the pallet to third-party liquidation

companies, a chunk of which ends up in landfills. At worst, hundreds of thousands of returned and unused items are purposefully destroyed by giant retailers, including Ulta and

Amazon, or they are outsourced by the billions of tons to secondhand markets in the Global South where they choke local markets and clog landfills. In an era of climate collapse,

economic uncertainty and ongoing supply chain issues, there is an urgent need to reduce consumption and divert waste from polluting the planet through progressive policy-making and

collective behavior change. With gift-giving season in full swing, it can feel daunting to shift your habits to reduce unwanted purchases. Below, we offer the best strategies to

take the pressure off holiday shopping, combining expert knowledge and vetted brand recommendations to help you avoid buyer’s remorse and incorporate more sustainable gift-giving

into your life. The accessibility of e-commerce coupled with a global pandemic has led to increased US online sales to over $100 billion each month — about half of total US sales

— which spike in late November during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and winter holiday shopping. “This explosive growth in online sales has also magnified one of e-commerce’s

biggest problems: returns,” writes journalist Amanda Mull on the “nasty logistics” of return policies. “The average brick-and-mortar store has a return rate in the single

digits, but online, the average rate is somewhere between 15% and 30%.” While refunds have been around for over a century, it wasn’t until recent years that returns have gotten

out of hand. “It’s a combination of the fact that Zappos will offer you shoes and the fact that there’s no place to take your old shoes to be repaired,” says Susan