Also the quality of the reporting is very poor and mostly seems intent at just making Amazon look bad. How much do others destroy? It’s a lot. There’s no ability for the reader to understand if this is bad (relatively speaking) or not.
Books used to have print runs, after 2 years or even less, anything excess got pulped (millions of items).
If you work in a western grocery store - the expiration date thing used to be ridiculous (perfectly good food in my view going out door). They wouldn't let workers take it home either because of potential conflicts. Inventory management has improved significantly here though I think (still an issue of course).
Amazon charges enough to cover the costs of the returned products. I've even been asked to throw away items myself (I returned something, they credit me the funds and asked I dispose of the item myself).
That includes theft, damaged items, and expired/unsellable food.
2% really doesn't sound bad, and I would guess is substantially lower than Amazon sees - especially considering estimates I could find suggest that the vast majority of that 2% is theft.
The gross profit for just about anything at Amazon is going to astronomical compared to just about any food category.
At some point you buy something you thought you'd need that you didn't. The same goes with businesses trying to sell. The difference from cleaning up your software project is that getting rid of physical product is not just deleting a few lines of code. It has to go somewhere.
Probably the scarcity by waste leads to more profits than trying to recycle, as the environmental costs of waste aren't paid by Amazon.