I've watched a couple of giant-box openings on youtube where people buy unsold/returned stuff (and feeling my soul draining through my eyeballs) and decided that the landfill is just exactly where most of this stuff needs to go.

Perhaps that can be the model of the New Economy. All of the 'knowledge workers' can design/manage surveillance and all of manufacturing can provide piles of things that go immediately to the dump.

In the UK a lot of the Amazon returns end up on John Pye auctions, which haven't been running at the same volume during the pandemic.

I wonder if Amazon are having to dispose of more items this way because their usual liquidation disposal chain is massively backlogged? If people like John Pye have all their warehouses already full, then there's nowhere for Amazon to send the stuff they'd normally dispose of that way, so it ends up at the local dump.

(Which, as an aside, is my local dump, as I live ~5 minutes drive from this specific Amazon warehouse, and the pictures in the piece match the local landfill site.)