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Businesses Earth United States

Free Returns Come With an Environmental Cost (theverge.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Packages leave a trail of pollution, and some end up in landfills. From a report: The biggest flood of returns will come on January 2nd as people head back to work after the holidays, when UPS expects to handle nearly 2 million return packages. That's a more than 25 percent jump from the packages it handled the previous year on January 2nd, which UPS has dubbed "National Returns Day." Amazon, which has driven the new shopping trends, just expanded its free return policy and is also delivering more of its own packages than ever. Luckily, there are things both individuals and companies can do to cut back on the boomeranging packages. [...] About half of the "uglies" that American consumers return go back on sale again, according to research by Optoro, a company that helps retailers like Ikea streamline their returns processes. Retailers might send things back to the manufacturer that they can't put up for sale again, or they might try to unload it to other companies who sell it at deep discounts.

Wherever the unwanted purchase goes, taking it there means more trucks pumping out more planet-warming carbon emissions and other harmful pollutants. Hauling around returned inventory in the US creates over 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, Optoro found. That's more than what 3 million cars might put out in one year. Then there's the trash. Five billion pounds of returned goods end up in US landfills each year. Even if something was in good condition when the buyer put it in the mailbox, shipping it back can damage the item. Sometimes retailers realize that throwing out a returned item is the most cost-effective way to deal with the thing, instead of paying for it to be cleaned, repaired, and returned to the shelves. Further reading: The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again.
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Free Returns Come With an Environmental Cost More

Free Returns Come With an Environmental Cost

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  • No shit, Sherlock. It's almost like moving mass takes energy and increases entropy and the Universe frowns on trying to get a free lunch.

    TANSTAAFL.

  • The human race comes with an environmental cost (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Friday December 27, 2019 @03:10PM (#59562740)
    Maybe it is about time we cut down on the former to cut down on the latter.

    • Maybe it is about time we cut down on the former to cut down on the latter.

      Are you volenteering?

    • Funny thing (Score:2, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

      Maybe it is about time we cut down on the human race

      Turns out that humans are the best thing that ever happened to the planet Earth, even with you included.

      The planet really had no-one else to watch over it before. Or to remember what was.

      • The planet really had no-one else to watch over it before. Or to remember what was.

        I'd mod that insightful but no points today.

  • 70% of emissions come from 100 companies (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday December 27, 2019 @03:15PM (#59562756)
    going after consumers isn't going to solve climate change. It's like spraying water at the top of a fire. You're wasting your time.

    OTOH if the goal is to distract, confuse and frighten then these articles send the message to consumers that if they ask their politicians to do anything about climate change then their lives will be made worse.

    As for why we see these sort of articles, well running stories that describe real, effective means of combating climate change (like the "Green New Deal") are generally Verboten, but you're more than welcome to run stories about banning plastic straws and charging consumers to return stuff. So if you're looking to run an environmental themed story your options are limited by design.
    • Consumers are the ultimate cause of this behavior and only when they change their habits will anything meaningful occur. We’ve been rounding up and putting drug dealers in jail for decades. Did drugs stop being sold? If people want something someone else will look for a way to deliver it, especially when there’s money to be made.

      And stop pushing idiotic crap like the Green New Deal. I and many others want nothing to do with socialism and social justice dressed up as environmentalism. It doesn
      • As a consumer the roads were already in place long before I was born, and I'm not young. I have little control over how the goods I buy are manufactured because around 7 companies make all the goods I purchase.

        This isn't a problem that can be solved with the free market. The free market is going to head for the path of short term profits like it always has. That's because the "free" market is a myth. Monopolies, gov't bail outs & subsidies, back door deals and collusion all mean the market is never

        • The rich and powerful don't need you. Maybe you'll be dead before that happens, you've got 20-30 years or so tops. Keep in mind this doesn't happen all at once. 70% of the manufacturing job losses in America were due to automation & process improvements. It's been happening under our noses while the right wing blamed immigrants.M

          The same arguments were made at the beginning of the industrial evolution, yet life just keeps getting better almost everywhere.

          • following the Industrial Revolution. High school and 100 level History books like to gloss over it. Luddite didn't start out as an insult, it was a movement by folk who lost their livelihoods and had nothing to replace it. WW I & II came along, killed a bunch of working age men, created a ton of new tech and blew up most of Europe & Asia, but before that it was stagnation and misery.

            That's been a pretty common pattern in human history. A Dark Age where a ruling elite prevent progress in order t

  • Return of a story (Score:5, Informative)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday December 27, 2019 @03:31PM (#59562808)
    Didn’t we discuss this only two weeks ago? Related article: https://slashdot.org/story/19/12/16/1611211/returned-online-purchases-often-sent-to-landfill [slashdot.org]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nwaack ( 3482871 )
      Yep. Look who posted both articles. Miss Mash REALLY needs to get booted as an editor. He/she/it is absolutely terrible at the job
  • Also: Organic farming produces more CO2 per pound of produce than industrial farming. Efficiency matters.

    • Re:Captain Obvious is back from the holiday break (Score:5, Interesting)

      by weilawei ( 897823 ) on Friday December 27, 2019 @04:23PM (#59562958)

      And yet, somehow, a number of people believe we can do everything organically.

      I hate to break it to you, as much as my personal garden may be organic, it doesn't scale to 7.5 billion people. Nitrogen fixation basically eliminated mass famines in industrialized nations and allowed previously unimaginable population growth.

      Composting, using no-till or tilling under cover crops, crop rotation--those can be important. But the blunt issue remains: you need atoms of nitrogen, in the soil, in the correct molecules, in order to be taken up and eventually made available for the construction of amino acids and proteins. If you look at the history of agriculture, you'll notice that we were running headlong as a species into the limitations of manuring and composting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        I've had this argument many times, typically I'll ask, "So do you have investments in a shovel factory, or what? 19th Century agriculture can only support a 19th Century population, so that's a lot of graves that will need to be dug."

        • I think that a key bit of understanding is missing from general views of agriculture today, namely that agriculture, like any other resource harvesting process, is a mining process.

          When you look at it that way, you realize that the soil can't just give and give forever. There's a movement of particular atoms of elements, and a balance that needs to be maintained. Every plant removed is a refined forn of nitrogen (et al.) removed from that cache of raw resources. If you don't refill the cache, no more refine

  • If UPS truck can deliver 200 packages it has lower environmental cost than 200 SUVs driving back to store to return package. You are more likely to optimize UPS trucks (switch them to electric) than optimizing all SUVs/cars.

    • If UPS truck can deliver 200 packages it has lower environmental cost than 200 SUVs driving back to store to return package.
      You are more likely to optimize UPS trucks (switch them to electric) than optimizing all SUVs/cars.

      And UPS (and FedEx, Purolator, DHL et al) will certainly always want to make more money. If electric trucks help them do that, more power to them. That makes it even more better than me driving to the mall.

  • If you are not a religious environmentalist your "free returns" are not a sin.

  • Everything has an environmental cost. Everything. And some people are just figuring this out now?

    • Isentropic computing has no environmental cost, by definition, but nobody's figured out a use for it or a really practical way to do it at scale.

  • most returns are caused by the product being a cheap knockoff or a terrible design or full of hidden gems like sending our location to HQ or crazy EULA, or just people gifting unconsciously the most banal crap to each other because nobody gives a fuck. So as usual some dumb ass politician, paid for by some lobby group, will pass a law that will put the blame on us the customer, like they did with plastic bottles and like they did with jay walking. So until we as westerners take a bit more care of our brain
  • ...despite the chiding from my builder that most houses didn't have fireplaces.

    I just held two mass cardboard burns the other day and will probably do a third tomorrow. Carboard burns pretty hot so I have to be careful not to "overheat" the flue, but that's easy to manage.

    If you can't burn your cardboard you might have a friend who would like the free burnables. Barring that I know most cities have some form or cardboard recycling, free and not free.

    Ferret

  • This seems like another push to end free returns, and make them costly to end users. So when we get a semi-decent product from BestBuy with dented parts, we shall then think ("Should I lose $6 to send it back, or can I live with some dents on my product?").

    Of course there is no "free" shipping in real life. It is all included in the costs. On the other hand large online retailers do get much better rates than us puny buyers. When they quote you $6 to return that article, it would not actually cost them as m

  • A lot of the returns go into the dumpster too. Then the dumpster divers come by, pull the crap out and put it on Amazon.

  • an environmental cost?
    I am asking as I don't.

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