Want to do good for the environment? Then stop returning things.
An online purchase often creates the most wasteful use there is of a whole lot of plastic – and by returning any of those items it becomes a doubly eco-unfriendly way to shop.
The business of ‘taking things back’ is now coming back to haunt us.
Single-use plastics, as they are called (whether, in fact, they are used once or many times), seem to have been nominated as one of the top villains in our escalating environmental catastrophe. The New Jersey “bag ban,” which went into effect in May of 2022 — also prohibiting paper bags at Big Box stores and most supermarkets — is being lauded by politicians and environmental groups alike as a success, despite shoppers now having accumulated huge amounts of “reusable” heavier shopping totes mostly from delivery services that never end up being reused.
But if you really want to do something nice for our planet, stop returning things.
Eat your losses and donate those unwanted, too big, too small, too ugly items to a thrift store. Ask friends if they need them or resell them yourself, but whatever you do, don’t return them!
Never really thinking much about what becomes of an item when it’s sent back, a purchase made at Lamps Plus online opened my eyes. It was a lamp shade that once seen in real life was a disappointment, but not a problem, as Lamps Plus has a very easy return policy. Told, however, that my “light as a feather giclee shade” didn’t qualify for free return shipping, I was given another option: destroy it.
Once photo proof of the “complete destruction” of the shade has been sent to Lamps Plus, I would be issued a full refund.
Sure, that’s nine bucks in my pocket, but really? Take a perfectly good (but ugly) lampshade, smash it and put it in the trash? Wondering if other retailers might also believe ending is better than sending, my naïveté about the extremely short life cycle of billions and billions of pounds of retail goods was shockingly exposed.
As it turns out, we are a world of trashers.
Numbers crunched by the resale company Optoro estimate that returns in the U.S. alone are responsible for 5 billion pounds of merchandise being sent to landfills each year – destruction apparently being cheaper and easier than reselling. Online giant Amazon has been the subject of several investigations as to its dumping habits. One recent undercover look at an Amazon warehouse in Scotland found thousands of items ranging from electronics to jewelry to books and face masks being carted off to a landfill –- a mix of brand-new and returned goods.
Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) did its own investigation in 2020, finding “tons and tons of Amazon returns” ending up at a Toronto “product destruction facility” where a minimum of one tractor trailer loaded with Amazon returned goods arrives weekly.
CBC also sent a “professional” dumpster diver (wait, there are professional dumpster divers?) out to some Toronto shopping malls, finding enough new items in the trash to open a retail store.
Yes, clothing and many other discarded returns aren’t made from plastic (although enough of these items that find their way to landfills represent their own environmental hazards). But with the myopic focus on banning store-provided bags, turning all those reusable-bag toting consumers into instant environmentalists, other destructive habits are being left in the dust. One recent study from the University of Sydney discovered the California bag ban shifted almost a third of the plastic reduced through the ban to the increased use of other disposable bags, including thicker plastic ones, for dog-walking cleanups – truly a guaranteed single-use.
Bringing your own bags to Target, Walmart and other retailers who ship tons of merchandise from online sales also won’t put a dent into the astonishing amount of plastic consumed in the hidden back rooms where merchandise is prepped for mailing, nor will it stop any practice a retailer may have of trashing its returns.
As an Arizona State University professor put it, “the life of a return is a very, very sad path.”