Quote of the Day (Pamela Paul, on the Environmental Price of Online Returns)

“Online returns create 16 million tons of carbon emissions or the equivalent of 3.5 million cars on the road for an entire year.

“It’s often cheaper for the seller to simply throw the item away than to inspect for damage, repackage and resell. Dumping returns (sometimes called ‘destroyed in field’ or ‘damaging out’) is often less costly than reusing them….

“In the United States, 2.6 million tons of returned clothes wound up in landfills in 2020. And that’s just clothing.”—“Opinion” columnist Pamela Paul, “When You Return Those Pants, The Planet Pays,” The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2024

(The image accompanying this post, showing Pamela Paul at the 2019 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, was taken Oct. 26, 2019, by Larry D. Moore.)