Returned online purchases often sent to landfill
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And then there is the endless stream of stuff that people gift each other because they are clueless about what a real gift would be like but they still want to give something. Terrible toys, terrible tools (break on first use) and cargo cult merchandise looking like the real thing but actually being just that: an image of the real thing.
What would a real gift be like?
Stocking filler plastic tat is not that. It's completely useless and either gets stashed in a store room or binned immediately.
I had thought this would just be intuitively obvious to anyone - buying stuff that's lower quality than you could personally use is just burning money.
I'd prefer that if someone can't afford or doesn't want to spend enough to get something useful they just don't at all. Spend the money on yourself or on charity.
Nothing is intuitively obvious, nothing is common sense, except maybe the UX quip about babies and breast feeding; that's a style of comment which is mostly a superiority boast.
There's a common saying along the lines of "buy once, buy for life" but pushback against it recently suggesting "buy the cheapest thing which will do, if you turn out to use it often enough to break it then consider buying a decent one". Stocking filler plastic tat might be enough to learn whether you have any interest in {jump rope, juggling, yo-yo, growing an indoor plant}.
There are industries built upon selling stuff that's literally useless. It's not just bad, as another post has said it's "cargo cult merchandise".
Normally this stuff isn't even on sale outside of the holiday period.
The resource usage difference between a good X and a bad X is also usually fairly minimal - it's the cost difference that's much larger.
Handcrafted and unique is fine, but suitability is much more important.
Also, books can be great gifts if you don't burden to receiver with the expectation to keep them (although they might). Nothing wrong with re-gifting books to friends, family, or colleagues. But again, only if you know the tastes of the recipient.
Being rich enough to afford many things (like new shoes not being something you have to plan your budget around) means that you are rich enough to throw things away. And if most people are this rich, then the salary of they guy checking returned shoes for minor defects & funny smells is also going to be high compared to the cost of the goods.
Past societies which didn't waste much just had lots of people who couldn't afford things, material goods we now take for granted. Like owning a dozen pairs of shoes.
I’ve had the same pair of dress shoes and boots for 25 years. The latter have been re-soled twice.
My analog watch just came back from the shop for servicing.
I recently built a audio (tube) amplifier kit. Again, very serviceable.
But it's going to be very hard because that means killing some profitable businesses, and right now profit is more important than the planet.
Hopefully it will be one day... but my feeling is that the current trend is for more and more useless junk to be produced for very marginal benefit. An example comes to mind: ipad literally at every tables of every restaurants in some US airports, just to take order... do we really need that? is it worth the impact on the environment?
Then there's deforestation, extinctions, topsoil loss, fish depletion, heavy metal pollution, etc.
I distinguish these problems because solving them all is rooted in changing our culture -- primarily our valuing growth and externalizing costs. Replacing those values with enjoying what we have and stewardship, which many civilizations have that lasted far longer than ours has taken to trash the planet, would make a big difference.
This community mostly talks technology, but changing values is probably more important in the long run.
1. Don't litter.
2. Switch to clothes made wholly from natural fabrics such as wool or cotton.
The problem with large pieces of plastic in the oceans is mainly caused by people in developing countries who dispose of their trash by throwing it in a river (because the only other choice is to burn it). That's not to say that people in more developed countries don't also contribute to ocean pollution but in developed countries the pollution mainly comes from washing clothes, as large pieces of plastic are safely disposed of by municipal waste collection.
Food packaging and things like building materials are the most difficult.
There are certain things that I think make sense to buy new or 'lightly used' - if you're going to run a vehicle (bicycle, motorcycle, car, whatever) into the ground then you're getting full use of it; and cars, at least until they're almost completely useless and melted for scrap, have a decent ecosystem for second hand parts.
In some sense I think manufacturing has become too 'good' relative to human labour. We're throwing things away because it "costs more" to repair them.
But it doesn't really cost more - it just costs more in monetary terms because waste (both in manufacturing and disposal) is externalized.
And actually making the environmental impact and waste recovery part of the price won't happen, because the masses will then vote for the populist party that promises not to take away your daily steak and cheap appliances.
We're kind of fucked — although I would love to have some glimmer of hope to hold on to.
tax only non renewable or finite resources and not labour
Finite resources include - land use (be it housing, leisure or agriculture though desirable locations should have higher taxes) - resources (metals, minerals) - fossil fuels
Not to be taxed: - labour - wealth (having money has no environmental impact. It's the spending that matters) - added value (get rid of VAT)
I feel like all tax systems are based on what is easy to be taxed, but I have never heard a good argument on why e.g. income should be taxed, but environmental impact not
It could, if the populist party promises a massive increase in working class jobs that repair the kinds of things we currently throw away.
Some waste is related to health or the logistics of mass production and would not be eliminated without more radical changes (and in some cases might not be possible to eliminated without major effects on health, such as many disposable items used in health care). In theory, manufacturing could work the way scientific exchanges is supposed to, with knowledge shared, and production more localized. This could also reduce waste quite a bit but is obviously a much larger and more difficult change from the current system.
When I'm done with it it goes back to the thrift store :-)
Celebrate the former; be wary of the latter.
Capitalist analysis tends to favour material progress as if this is the zenith of human existence.
Markets are useful but they only cover a third of human life, the physical (although money is abstract it represents the ability to command material goods and services). The emotional and intellectual are reduced to second class citizens in service of the master munching market.
Sure: Capitalism is basically the term invented by the socialist movement for the things they wished to replace. But the idea that they could do a better job at delivering material progress (to the average joe) was pretty much their central claim.
I’m specifically trying to argue that material progress alone is not sufficient and that is what the current system, whatever you call it, does. Encourage material progress.
And for the record I completely agree that material progress obviously isn't the only thing which matters.
Celebrate the former; be wary of the latter.
Your distinction isn't clear to me; request elaboration.
The distinctions are usually not very clearly presented, because reasons. There are a few dimensions that have become evident to me:
- Markets are exchange mechanisms. They are not specific to private capital ownership.
- Capital is productive capacity. "Capitalsim" is an economic system in which capital is (putatively) the critical input to production.
These are only two of numerous possible elements that an economic system might consider. Among others:
- Property is legally-enforcible claims to control, benefit, or exclusion, from defined economic elements. Those might be personal / mobile / chattle property, real (land) property, productive capital, trademarks, copyrights, patents, contracts, specific other legal rights or licences, animals and livestock, mineral and land rights, and in certain times and places, other human beings.
- Social welfare is a claim to general rights (healthcare, education, unemployment or disability insurance, retirement pensions) which might be included.
- Various social rights or restrictions, including privileges or restrictions / legal sanctions.
- Accountability and/or liabilities for various risks or consequences.
At various times and places, individuals have held birthright to community capabilities, or been all but wholly restricted from it. Land has been deemed private, or held in common, or subject to temporary lease or bequeathing from a king or other government. Labour has been entirely free to move across international boundaries (where those even existed), or entirely bound to specific feudal lands. Ownership rights in property may be near total, or highly restricted.
You can have markets with or without private capital, you can have private property with or without inheritance, you can have market capitalism with or without liberal democracy, you can have liberal democracy without market capitalism. And numerous other variants.
Even blowers and fans are inexpensive ($150) to do it yourself.
Now messing with refrigerants or natural gas; call someone.
The water heater has an aluminum or magnesium anode rod to prevent corrosion. That will dissolve after several years. They sell them at the big box hardware store; they screw right in.
"The flame sensor is a rather simple device located at the burner assembly. It's not much more than a thin, usually bent, metallic rod that sits in front of the flame stream inside the furnace. The purpose of the flame sensor is to confirm to the system that whenever the gas valve is open, a fire is actually present"
Small changes in procedures and behavior in the food and bev industry would go a long way with reducing waste. I think most customers would welcome it. But I guess this goes back to the original problem: Making a new cup is cheaper than reusing the existing one. Perhaps a waste tax or reuse tax credit for businesses are needed to move forward.
ever notice in a buffet you are not allowed to reuse your previous dish?
In retrospect, this is what I observe as a customer in most cases.
Curiously, I think the 10 cent tax on grocery bags has been enough to change people's behavior. I know I started to carry my own canvas grocery bag ever since I was told there was a 10 cent tax for each bag. My other motivation was simply trying to reduce waste, which I was made more conscious of by being told of the bag tax.
I think the difference might be in the bag tax being mentioned by the checkout clerk. Whenever you go to buy groceries and you want a bag, almost invariably you're asked if a 10 cent charge for the bag is ok, whereas in the case of buying coffee the price of the disposable coffee cup is not mentioned. So it's a lot easier to ignore.
If every time you got coffee you were asked if paying 10 cents for your coffee cup was ok, I think more people would choose to bring their own.
He insisted that I should get a fresh cup with a lid and straw and all just for water.
Pro tip: they're selling their annual January tumbler which includes free drip coffee or tea for the entire month of January, for $40. It's a nice stainless steel cup, too.
And for any cup, you get $.10 "own cup" discount.
I think we (as a society) urgently need to adjust our "gift giving" culture.
1. open box, put it on the table
2. put it in the closet
3. move it to the garage
4. move it to the storage unit
5. take it to the dump
He argued that Amazon should offer a shipping option to shortcut all this - just have it shipped directly to the dump!
I recently joined the local "Buy Nothing" community.
I am fortunate enough to live a block away from a donation center [though NextDoor members will go out of their way to tell you their opposite opinion].
Yes, I can do more regarding buying less stuff. I am keeping in mind being active on giving "another life" to what I am decluttering both in-house and on to others.
Please don't by technology gifts for people unless you really know what they want.
It's certainly not universal because where I shop online, I often see a size+color briefly come "back in stock" because it had sold out but one was returned. I've snagged desired items a few times that way -- and seen it go back out of stock after my order went through because it really was the only one left.
But second... the article isn't suggesting a clear solution here. You can't tell people to just keep the items they don't want, because there's no way to verify they're telling the truth, so you have to make them ship items back. For high-value items that are guaranteed to sell, it always makes economic sense to hire someone to inspect and restock the items. But for low-value items where it actually costs more to inspect and restock than the item is wholesale, it's just rational business.
I don't think the issue here is returns, it's waste period. The full environmental cost of producing and disposing of products needs to be included in original retail prices. Then, companies will be rationally incentivized to re-sell or donate items rather than dispose of them.
Source: https://www.zeit.de/2019/25/retouren-amazon-onlinehandel-mue...
1. Shipping damages are a huge reason why items have to be junked. Cardboard boxes are not meant to last long. Its rare for an item to go through more than a few shipments without needing to be completely re-boxed. I wish everyone could see the boxes that get sent back to our returns warehouses, sometimes you'd think these boxes have been purposefully destroyed.
2. Luxury brands are very strict about re-sale of items on discount sites. The explicitly prevent companies from re-selling their items on clearance.
3. Items do get sent to charity.
4. There is a huge cost involved in processing returns which means that items that could be re-sold often get junked or liquidated. Its great in theory to talk about re-selling used jackets, but someone has to process that item, ship that item, and buy that item at a cost that makes it worth it. Warehouse space is limited. Why would I use that space to keep used goods, when I can keep items that will make me more profit.
1) many logistics processes (even inside e-retail companies) are designed around packaging that should survive being sent through normal post/package service (ie. "fragile" means "may not survive fall from 3 means, but should survive fall from 1 meters", "this way up" markings are ignored, etc.) and not around generally more fragile retail-level single item packages.
2) Even if retailer repacks the products into reasonably sturdy transport packaging, often there is either insufficient (usually due to operator error/inexperience) or outright none (in some cases by design of the process) inner padding.
This comes from the fact that packing everything completely correctly is expensive, both financially and in terms of the environmental cost (all the packaging material will be thrown away, period) so it tends to done in terms of experience with how bad the packaging can be before the amount of returns due to shipping damage out-weights the savings in packaging costs.
#2 sounds plausible, but there are only so many luxury brands in the world. I bet lots of companies want to believe that they're luxury brands, and destroy returned merchandise to attempt to maintain this, but really aren't.
Re #4: How can we make it worth it? Couldn't they just drop a bunch of returned products on a pallet, and sell the lot for a fixed price? There's plenty of sellers on eBay/Craigslist with seemingly infinite time to sort and resell items like this. I bet if any clothing store in the city posted "$250 for 1 cubic meter of the latest returned clothing items from the internet, unspecified quality/quantity, you pick up", it'd be gone in an hour, every time.
Worn Wear is Patagonia's hub for keeping gear in play.
Why extend the life of gear? Because the best thing we can do for the planet is cut down on consumption and get more use out of stuff we already own.
Join us to repair, share and recycle your gear.
AIUI, online returns that are slightly mangled and in store returns that aren’t quite like-new are also sold here, as well as serviceable but old clothes you can exchange.
NB you can also perpetually repair most patagonia clothes, for free. They do most repairs in contract with local tailors, and have a central repair shop for bigger jobs, so they keep money in the neighborhood and also cut way down on shipping emissions.
I'm seeing more and more stores these days selling brand new things as refurbished just as a form of price differentiation. Unless you really believe that Kitchen Aid has hundreds of returned stand mixers in every single color.
$150 for a hoodie layer (R1) i’ve repaired 5 times and had for a decade amortizes out to a pretty fair price.
And they have an excellent culture. Employees get voting days off, they’re closed on black friday, they do loads of good sponsorship and support for outdoor sports, they’re happy to spend on conservation efforts...
I’d rather give them my money than many other companies.
Nudie Jeans have repair shops in quite a few cities. The repairs are free. If you don’t like to keep your jeans then they give you a discount (20%?) if you trade your old Nudies in. The sell them second hand after they fix them up. I got a recent pair repaired (unusable before the repair) and bought a second hand pair for $50. So effectively I got two pairs for $25 each. Never buying any other brand jeans again I think. https://www.nudiejeans.com/repair-spots#stores
Trippen shoes in German repair their shoes. I have had shoes from them for at least 20 years. I wore some for 12-15 years with a good refurbishment in between. They are not cheap, but comfortable, sturdy and refurbishable. They mailed them back to me when done. https://en.trippen.com/reparaturen
Houdini Sportsware recycle their old clothes. They also buy back used and resell. https://houdinisportswear.com/en-us
> It's an image thing. They're trying to maintain exclusivity.
We’ve reached a pretty dismal place as a society where a company would rather burn their wares than to have a person in need get them.
Who's going to bother photographing "undesirables" to reverse image search something that might be a removed logo from a trendy brand?
The only reason to buy a luxury brand is to signal that you are not poor.
IPhones are a different matter. They haven't much of a signal of exclusivity or wealth because, for whatever reason, even the poor will seemingly make whatever sacrifice they need to, or impose on others, to get their hands on them. I'm regularly on transit through some very, very poor areas and yet their kids all have iPhones, often the very latest. God knows what was done to enable that circumstance, but it's quite different from, say, a legitimate Prada jacket.
Clothes are often made in large automated factories. Insisting some human beings manually examine, clean, press and repackage clothing to avoid 'waste' is the opposite of a good idea. Its enormous cost to the economy, and indirectly to the environment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786747
Individuals duplicating content without taking from the creator is viewed less acceptable than manufacturers, or more accurately, retailers, deliberately destroying perfectly serviceable physical product.
By whom? I don't think this is true at all.
It's less acceptable to the sellers of said goods, not to society at large.
The legal system doesn't represent the will of the people in all cases; in the case of copyright law it's quite obviously weighted more towards representing the will of money.
It's erroneous to just picture the same world with paid media missing and nothing else sprouting up.
I'm sure if enough people want Dexter and are willing to pay for it, they'll get it, even without copyright law.
This seems like an overly naive way of thinking, see Prisoner's Dilemma as a starting point.
Even Dexter fans may submit that it's not the author + 70 years or 90 year corporate copyright term that is essential for its creation, but rather the revenues made possible through exclusive rights to advertising and subscriptions in the first few years of release.
Well, the eyes of the law, for starters, and all that that includes and implies.
I was super hungry, and grateful for that banana. A man with two kids also grabbed some for the young ones.
It's a small thing and probably doesn't achieve much in the end but I really like the idea.
Packaged food is sold at a discount near its expiry date.
The fact that it's cheaper helps too
- recently the price difference on many items isn't worth the risk (e.g. a saving of 5% off the regular price)
- sometimes you receive an item that someone has fraudulently returned (e.g. someone has an old broken item, buy a new one from Amazon, and return the old one pretending they just changed their mind); I had this happen once for an expensive item ($600), and the original return slip was still in the box. It was obvious that the item returned had been used for quite some time, and didn't work.
- the items don't seem to be checked too well: I recently received an item which was missing an essential part
Still, Amazon's return process is great when they're at fault, so overall it's still worth it.
Recently purchased an older zenbook this way and it has clearly seen some use (and battery was dead). Still happy though since the similarly priced netbooks I was looking at were garbage spec'd.
The basic economic lever is simple with implications that go far: it costs more to process a returned good than the value one could accrue from reselling it because returned goods need to be processed three times while regular goods only need to be processed once. If 3% of your shipped goods are returned you are making a healthy profit. If 10% are returned you are breaking even. If 20% are returned you are going under. Goods are usually manufactured at 25% their retail cost and businesses have overhead that profit needs to cover.
A lot of the return cost is additional labor and shipping. If you can minimize transport (sort returns at local factories/DCs rather than shipping back to China) and minimize cost of processing returns with low-skill labor (say supplementing with high resolution cameras/scales/machine learning inspection by comparing your 'returned' good against thousands of known good versions of your good) one could tackle this. Laws would help in that they would force product designers to push to more assembly and less fabrication steps and fewer steps overall.
The easiest way to change that would be to make disposal more expensive. Start a land filling tax (and/or a carbon tax, which would hit incinerators), and suddenly a lot of these businesses would run the numbers and say “never mind, let’s actually process the returns.” Or alternatively they’d say, “hmm we can’t make free shipping free returns work anymore,” which I think is also fine.
Which does not imply the rest is profit, of course (since all the competing stores do the same). More like that they threw half of it out at the end of the season.
My wife has an embroidery machine, so I get custom shirts. I have a yellow, red, and blue set of polos with Star Trek insignias, a Smith Chart, radio circuits, etc.
This is simply an extension of the current "a company exists only to bring shareholders profit" viewpoint. Why resell returned purchases when it's cheaper to destroy them and claim a tax break on them?
Why sell robust toys, tools, clothing, etc. when it's cheaper to sell expensive pieces of "minimum viable product" that needs to be replaced every year.
Even when the cost is an unsustainable long-term business (not to mention long-term environmental and social impact), so long as the executives and shareholders profit from their short-term investment in the company they all shrug their shoulders and move on to the next ephemeral business.
Do you remember when you were regarded as a customer by a big brand - as an equal who had a relationship with that brand - instead of a consumer? It's been a long time for me.
I recently ordered something from a manufacturer on Amazon. After couple of days, they dropped price on product by $20. So I called up Amazon for price adjustment. I was politely asked to return it to manufacturer and order a new one.
Seriously, Amazon cannot work with manufacturers to just refund price difference instead of returning the product and ordering it again. It is wasteful at so many levels.
Because on the one hand, anyone can get a "de facto" price adjustment by buying a new one, keeping the old one, and returning the new one as the old one.
Now if consumers all actually did this and shipping were offered free for consumers, you'd see every company offering price adjustments within the return window, just so they could save on the shipping and handling they'd otherwise be paying for.
But in reality, a lot of consumers won't go through the hassle because it's not worth it in the end, or just too annoying. In that case, a company can save a lot more money by not offering price adjustments -- clearly Amazon's strategy here.
The most profitable strategy for any particular company on any particular product category can be either of these or somewhere in the middle. Which is why, even for companies that offer price adjustments, they're often predicated on a shorter time window (1 week instead of 60 days), only being on merchandise that was originally full-price (so you can go from 0% discount to 40%, but not 20% to 40%), or other exclusions which result in the most profitable overall balance.
It's kind of fun stuff to get into, actually.
The bigger challenge is converting our systems. E.g. Here in San Francisco our water comes from Hetch Hetchy about 200 miles away. There is very little public awareness (yet) that this is the kind of thing that will have to change if we're going to live in harmony with Nature.
I've been toying with the idea of trying to create a new town somewhere along holistic lines but personally I'm a recluse and I don't actually want to deal with the social stuff that would entail.
So instead, I'm building robots that can arrange and glue small pieces of material together to create larger laminated/aggregated building material. (Image search "timbrel vault"[1] and imagine little spidery machines making those out of irregular bits of {wood,metal,plastic,etc} placed and aligned with CV+ML. Or consider the agglutinated shells of certain amoebae[2].)
I imagine a sort of distributed inside-out factory that "eats" landfill and "poops" new resources.
(I just got my servos yesterday!)
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timbrel+vault&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iax...
After the second night, my SO complained her neck was hurting so we contacted the return people. They said they would send someone to pick up the mattress from us.
Next day a 1800 Junk showed up and the guys threw it in the back. Essentially after two days of use it went in the landfill (I assume). So I learned to be skeptical of offers of free returns on items that touch the body.
In the end we found that the NovaFoam mattress from Costco was better for us and it was less expensive.
The actual goods are very secondary, and are increasingly poor quality. Designer shirts I buy these days rip in the elbows and fray at the collar in less than 40 wears or so; jeans wear through at the knee at around the 100 day mark.
I would be surprised if materials and labour for production exceeded £10 on a typical £100 shirt or jeans.
...and? Is this where we are going, I can't do whatever the fuck I want with the stuff I own?
Other people are free to have opinions of you.
Destroying something that someone could use is a dick move.
We're talking about a businesses' practices, not an individual.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/amazon-france-under-fire-for...
Also, what's the deal with posting an entirely different link?
I think op is talking about businesses being able to do what they want with their products.
You own the object.
Your ownership claim over the landfill, or the air around you if you burn it, or whatever else, is far weaker.
And it makes total sense, owning only makes sense as a societal concensus, otherwise, you might own something until someone stronger clubs you in the face and gets your stuff. We agreed that individuals having some rights over things is benefitial for society as a whole, it makes sense to restrict those rights if we see they cause harm.