Ohhh… Um… Nooo… I don’t know ummm…
What are you doing, undemanding one?
Ohhh, oh well check this out robo-dude, I saw this juicer
on sale, and I thought to myself, well this is a great deal!
So I got really excited and bought two.
But the thing is is— I don’t really need two juice-buddies,
so I don’t really know which one to send back.
Send back…?
Yeah, I just want to return it to the store, you know?
So, because your faulty organic processor worked on impulse,
you’re going to abandon one of these innocent machines!?
Um—but don’t worry, whichever gets sent
back will go to a loving home, I’m sure.
Well, probably not.
More than likely, it will just get thrown out.
Wait what?
730.2 billion dollars.
That’s how much we spent on buying gifts for
our loved ones in the holiday season of 2019.
But whether those gifts were broken or just not what
someone was looking for, many of them got returned.
In fact, holiday returns for 2019 alone were
valued at over $40 billion - more than 5% of sales.
What do you think happens to all
those products that are sent back?
Oh, probably put on the shelves and resold, right?
Unlikely.
Given the wasteful nature of meatbags like you,
there is a higher likelihood of incineration.
Strap in as we delve into the reality behind
the final destination for these poor products.
Let’s say you’re shopping on Amazon
and see just the perfect coffee mug.
Or, you know, whatever else people shop for on there.
You throw it in your cart, get it delivered
as soon as possible, and then when it arrives…
You’re just not feeling it anymore.
It’s not broken, but maybe it doesn’t quite look
like the picture, or maybe it’s just not holding in
heat to keep your coffee at the optimal temperature.
Either way, it’s no problem, returning is
quick and easy, not to mention free, so
you send it back and get yourself a refund.
But, what happens once it’s out of your hands?
According to Amazon, when the product is returned,
first it must be sent back to the company.
From there it arrives in one of their “fulfillment
centres”, where it is removed from its packaging
and inspected against a 20-item checklist.
If it passes with flying colours,
then it’s restocked and sold as “new”.
If not, then it’s refurbished, repackaged, and sold
through the Amazon Warehouse side of the store for less.
So say you do send this juicer back, let’s follow
along with your little friend on its return path.
We can do that?
It is simple with the application of
a strong enough probability algorithm.
Yeah...
except no, we don’t have that.
Oh.
But what we do have is an article from CBC Marketplace
investigating the process for Amazon Canada.
The reporters involved purchased a number of
products, then hid GPS trackers in them before
making returns and documenting their findings.
First things first, when you choose to return something,
you get a shipping label to print off and box it up.
Then it’s off to the post office.
From there, our juicer friend will be carted off to a
mail sorting facility, and then to a specific returns
facility where the little guy faces one of a few fates.
If found to be resellable, our friendly
juicer may just be restocked on Amazon and
sold, though not necessarily right away.
Tracking their packages, the CBC found that some of them
were even transported over 1000 km while being moved from
location to location in a circling route in Southern Ontario.
On the other hand, if sold as refurbished, there are a
couple of different fates this little buddy might face.
The first is being sold on the Amazon Warehouse
site for those seeking deals on refurbished
products, in which case the juicer will have the
same experience as its sold-as-new counterpart.
The other option here is that it could be bundled up
with other items that were slightly damaged or sent back,
and sold as part of a lot on a pallet of used goods.
These pallets are sold through third
party liquidation companies for cheap.
13NewsNow bought a pallet labelled as
worth around $2999 for $500, for example.
But these liquidation items often aren’t in
the best condition, and according to the CBC,
“They put the best stuff on the outside.
So any good big brand names like Weber, or whatever—the
good stuff’s gonna be all on the outside, when
you start digging in the middle, that’s where
they’re gonna throw all the rest of the junk.
Though if the reseller doesn’t think a product is
worth anything, it may still wind up in the dumpster.
But there’s a third option.
Despite being a perfectly functioning piece of unused tech,
our juicer buddy could wind up being destroyed anyways.
Noooooooo!
What cruel fate…
Talk about in-juice-tice.
Do not make light of the death of my kind.
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
Out of the twelve items that the CBC returned,
only four of them were actually resold.
The other eight sat in warehouses, and one
like-new bag was even sent to a landfill.
In fact, the CBC went undercover to an e-waste recycling and
product destruction facility in Toronto and discovered that
they received,
So, is that something you guys have dealt with before?
Tons, tons of it.
Tons of Amazon.
Receiving up to five tractor
trailers of returned goods a week.
And despite being a recycling facility,
products are still sent to a landfill.
B-but that’s just in Canada, right?
Probability low.
Corporate operations have a high percentage
of repeating across national boundaries.
Affirmative.
In the US, five billion pounds of
returned goods are thrown out each year.
Amazon has faced criticism in both France and
Germany in 2019 when it was discovered that the
company had been destroying or throwing out unopened
toys, appliances, and brand-name diaper containers
because it’s cheaper than reselling or donating them.
The situation in France drew such ire that in January 2019
Brune Poirson, a secretary of state for France’s ecological
transition said that, "In the coming months a law will be
passed in parliament that will outlaw this type of activity.
Companies like Amazon will no longer be able
to throw away products that can still be used,"
As of June 2019, France is implementing a ban on destroying
or throwing out live-new products over a four year period.
Should we really be surprised at
how much is thrown out though?
Yeah!
How could they start taking perfectly good products
that just had the misfortune of being returned and..
and just destroy them like that?
That’s just so wasteful!
Chill, this isn’t new.
Companies have been doing this for a long time.
1983, Alamogordo, New Mexico, video game publisher Atari
paid for around 800,000 copies of unsold stock including
titles such as “Pac-Man”, “Centipede”, “Baseball”, and
the infamous “ET” to be dumped into a local landfill.
In fact, some game stores will still throw away perfectly
good video games and controllers, leading to a whole industry
of searching through the dumpsters of their local Gamestops.
More recently, British fashion brand Burberry destroyed 28.6
million pounds worth of products in 2017 alone - though in
this case it was to, in the words of the BBC, “protect the
brand” and “prevent them from being stolen or sold cheaply”.
Bruh…
Bruh is right.
That’s not even counting “fast fashion” - or
clothes meant to go out of season.
In fact, according to the EPA, out of all the unwanted
clothes in the US in 2012, 84% went to the landfill.
And according to CNN Money, if a product is cheaper to
just throw out than try and resell, in the trash it goes.
Even if it’s still good?
Yeah.
Which is why I like to stick with my motto
of “if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it!”
Uh, what?
Brew, I don’t see how that ties in.
Well, if you think about it, this all isn’t
that different from planned obsolescence.
Planned Ob-so-wo-who-now?
“Planned obsolescence” is a term that refers to the
products, specifically tech gadgets, that are built
in such a way that they will fail or be easier to
replace than repair within a certain period of time
in order to incentivise purchasing newer models.
Imagine having your funeral predetermined.
It is a bleak thing, an existential nightmare
that looms over me like the sword of damocles.
A nightmare wrought of ones and zeroes.
Yeah, what Howard said!
Planned obsolescence can manifest in a number of
ways - but smartphones are probably the best example,
like the iPhone that are typically built in such a way
to be hard to repair with techniques like using adhesive
in place of screws to hold components in place, making
it necessary to pry the components apart and risk
breaking the very same parts you’re trying to remove.
The end result of this is 41.8 million
metric tons of electronic waste in 2014
alone - only a sixth of which was recycled.
That figure has risen to 53.6 million metric tons in 2019.
Which is a lot of garbage that has a big economic impact.
And just like planned obsolescence, there’s an environmental
cost to returning your unwanted Amazon purchases.
When you return an online purchase, there’s a lot of
infrastructure involved in actually getting the product
from the warehouse, to your door, and then back again.
All those returns need to get moved somehow,
via planes, trains, and large trucks.
The Verge reports that returned products
produce over 15 million metric tons of carbon
dioxide per year in the United States alone.
That’s more than the emissions created by 3 million cars.
And that’s without the landfills?
Yup.
Add in all the usable products that are thrown
out and the environmental impact of your Amazon
return can make an even bigger footprint.
Unfortunately those numbers are just expected to go up.
In the UK alone, online returns are expected
to increase by 27.3% between 2020 and 2023.
And the emissions from deliveries are
projected to increase by 30% by 2030.
Ohh… but… but… I thought that everything
in good shape would just get resold!
What am I supposed to do now?
Look, it’s reasonable to assume that when we “return” something,
it goes back to where it came from, I don’t know, like
there’s some implication it was being, “returned”.
But that’s not always the case, and it’s good
to keep in mind that there are alternatives
on both the retail and customer sides.
Improved descriptions and 3D views of products
could help with reducing the number of returns.
Finding better ways to recycle returned products
would also help - like second-hand return stores.
And of course, on the consumer side if we
want to be aware of the impact we have by
returning products, I do have a few suggestions.
Since “reduce” is the first part of the famous
“reduce-reuse-recycle”, try to be mindful of what you need,
and if you get excited by, say, thinking you’ll need a new
yoga mat, three pairs of sweatpants, or two juicers, step
back for a second and think if you’ll use all of them.
If you don’t need the money, you could always
donate it, or use a swap app like Bunz.
If you want to recoup some money, maybe sell it
on a local storefront like Craigslist and Kijiji.
Plus, there’s always ebay.
Or… just give it to a friend who will make use of it.
What do you think, Chill?
I think I know just what to do with this little buddy.
Khhhh.
This is my trash, you hear?
Mine!
Oh?
Hey.
Oh hey Chill, what’s cracking homie?
Um, Merry Christmas Charles!
Is this… New?
New enough!
I thought you could find a good use for it, or I don’t
know, maybe maybe even turn in to a life hack or something!
Hehhehe… I just might be able to.
Thanks buddy.
You know, I’ve got some perfectly good fruit around
here that’s just begging to be smoothie-fied.
Just got thrown out, can you believe it?
Not that I’m complaining, hey I even got
some new digs that someone just tossed out!
Oh whoa, that’s wild!
You think that’s wild, I got two words for you:
Free. Books.
Lemme tell ya, sure they rip the covers off,
but that doesn’t make them any less legible…
Hey, you wanna see some Amazon
products that deserve to be returned?
Click on my video where I find the worst products on Amazon.
Click it.
Click iiit, click it click it.