Think about the last thing you bought—did you buy it in person or online? Since the Covid-19 pandemic, online shopping has skyrocketed in popularity. Instead of browsing brick-and-mortar stores for clothes and other goods, many Americans open an app or internet browser for their shopping needs.
But with online shopping comes returns. You can’t try on clothes, examine goods, or otherwise check what you’re buying like you can in person. According to the U.S. Post Office, online purchases were
8 times more likely to be returned than purchases made in stores. More often than not, those returned items aren’t resold but instead thrown out.
Each year, about 5.8 billion pounds of returned goods end up in landfills. That’s because it’s cheaper for companies to toss items than it is to pay to ship returns to a sorting facility and have them checked to see if they can be resold, explains Gad Allon. He’s a professor of operations, information, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania. Clothing is particularly likely to end up in a landfill.
If you have to make a return, returning the item in person at a store is more likely to result in it going back on sale instead of being thrown out. But experts agree the best way to combat wasteful returns is to buy less. “Everything boils down to us as consumers at the end,” says Allon.