This paragraph from the article is also blatantly untrue in the context of Amazon:
>We can dispense now with a common myth of modern shopping: The stuff you return probably isn’t restocked and sent back out to another hopeful owner
No, that's not really what happens: it's one of the biggest bugbears of third party Amazon sellers that FBA workers are biased towards restocking even damaged or dirty products. It creates problems for third party seller performance metrics and also issues for customers. The seller is blamed when a customer complains about such a damaged product. When possible most professional sellers prefer to process their own returns so that they can discard or repackage items that have been damaged.
Some of the statistics in the article also conflate the situation with apparel, in which huge proportions of likely returns must be factored in, with other categories in which return rates are really quite low. This is something that all sellers will know like the back of their hands because their return rates are in their dashboards and have to be planned for in all business metrics.
Furthermore, at least with Amazon, few items are "destroyed" even when they are slated to be destroyed. They are often resold on pallets to other sellers or directly to customers through Warehouse Deals. This causes problems when, say, items that have been alleged to be counterfeit are slated for "destruction" but instead wind up recirculated through Warehouse Deals or to liquidation sellers.
This paragraph touches on it without going into the full implications:
>This is why it’s difficult to accurately estimate what portion of returned merchandise is discarded, or even how much waste it adds up to, though we do know that billions of pounds of returns are thrown away in the U.S. every year. Joel Rampoldt, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners, told me that most people in the industry believe that about 25 percent of returns are discarded, although the proportion varies widely depending on the product (clothing tends to be easier to resell than electronics that may contain user data, for example).
Even electronics slated for recycling or destruction often instead are sold to refurbishers. There's less waste than you might think when it's possible for actual junk to be resold as refurbished. The reason why it's not necessarily tracked is that the e-waste processing plant is not going to report to research firms about all the refurbishers that they sell to, even though there are pretty well built up electronics refurbishing certification organizations that promote the practice.
Not all journalists are bad: I've been a source (directly quoted and on background) on topics like this for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Verge, Bloomberg, and others and have sometimes been pleasantly surprised by the amount of work and thought that the journalist did. Quality of articles has very little to do with the brand of the publication and everything to do with the quality of the individuals involved in writing the article. In this I think she picked mostly good sources and touched on some of the major themes, but a lack of familiarity with the industry undermined her ability to synthesize all the information.
It seems like she kind of came into it with the preconceived notion that returns are bad for the environment, and then assembled a bunch of information that neither fully supported nor fully undermined that preconception.
What's also missing from this article is that free returns are essential for establishing customer trust in ecommerce before purchases are made. People are more confident to make the purchase when they know they can return it. They are just much more circumspect with their money when they can't return it. The cost of processing returns is lower than the cost of liquidation and restocking with new product, so that is why the practice has become particularly more prevalent with online retail.
That's what'd be challenging to measure. It's really an issue in which returns result in maybe 12.5% junk, 12.5% resalable, versus a situation in which maybe 60% of the stuff on the shelf would have to be liquidated because customers were more circumspect with making a purchase in the first place. Stopping returns in the name of the environment could easily have the unintended consequence of resulting in more discarded new products due to lack of customer confidence.