> Lots of returns end up in the trash too.
Yup, apparently until recently Amazon didn't bother finding a new buyer for the returned products and simply trashed most of them. Now there's a cottage industry of people buying returns in bulk, sorting through, and reselling the quality stuff (kind of like the industry around auctioning unclaimed storage unit contents). However, I imagine that many cheap products even now don't go through the auctioning process and go directly to waste.