How to clean up the messy business of e-commerce returns

Free returns. It’s a huge selling point for online retailers to entice potential customers, making purchases as seamless as possible. But e-commerce returns are a messy, wasteful process. Not only do retailers lose hundreds of billions in revenue each year, the environmental impact is startling.
Very few experts have been able to quantify the waste generated in regions like Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but the numbers in the U.S. are sobering: in 2020 alone, an estimated 2.6 million tonnes of returns ended up in landfills, according to a report from Optoro. The process of shipping returned items led to 16 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that year. That’s equivalent to the emissions generated by powering two million homes for a year.