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.)

Photo of the Day: Environmental Walkway, Olsen Park, Bogota NJ

This afternoon, after walking in Foschini Park in Hackensack, I crossed the Lt. Ryan Memorial Bridge to a place I’d never visited in my 60 years in Bergen County: Bogota's Oscar E. Olsen Park. The park’s environmental walkway, seen here in this photo I took, affords a fine vantage point to look west onto the Hackensack River.

Nature watchers can not simply peer beyond the rail for signs of life, but also read the signs on the walkway that explain such matters as the plumage of birds, the food chain of the creatures below, and the river's function as a resting spot for ducks.