Retailers and brands have long struggled with what to do with returns. It’s one thing to have an item returned directly to the store, where it can be examined and most likely put back on the shelf. But with the rise of ecommerce, the problem has escalated. It’s quite common for folks to buy four or five items with the intent of only keeping one…or none. In a recent Semafor posting, Tim McDonnell notes, “The pandemic launched an online shopping boom, and a tidal wave of returned items followed. This year [2023], the retail value of product returns in the U.S. alone will approach $1 trillion, according to Hitendra Chaturvedi, a professor of supply chain economics at Arizona State University. Yet costs and inefficiencies in “reverse logistics” mean that for most returned items—up to 9.5 billion pounds (4.3 billion kilograms) in the U.S.—it’s cheaper for the retailer to send the product to a landfill than to bother reselling it: Chaturvedi estimates that 80% of returned products end up in the trash. But a growing number of retailers are turning to artificial intelligence to help.”

This is tragic and certainly not the direction we want to go, as individuals, companies, governments, and the world as a whole. And all of that waste certainly outweighs the efforts, however large or small, brands and retailers are making to reduce packaging, minimize the carbon footprint associated with transport, and more accurately forecast manufacturing of their collections. You sort of want to say, what’s the point, if 80% of returns just go to the landfill! And it doesn’t seem there is much action being taken to change this travesty.

First of all, each of us, as consumers, can stop this ridiculous behavior! Don’t order five things knowing you are going to return four of them—or all of them. If you order something and it’s defective, that’s one thing. But by carefully examining sizing metrics, colors, etc., each of us should be able to figure out the one item we need in which size. And if you get something via ecommerce and don’t like it, re-sell it to someone else! Or donate it. Or use an app like Poshmark or RealReal. For heaven’s sake, don’t just send it back to be relegated to the landfill! We all buy too many clothes anyway, IMHO.