Amazon’s distribution network operates on an almost incomprehensible scale. The e-commerce juggernaut ships 25 million packages each day, and that number rises even more during the holiday season. But not all objects stay at their destination. Thanks to Amazon Prime Perks and the company’s notoriously generous return policy, many items are returned. The company allows customers to return products to brick-and-mortar retail locations such as Whole Foods grocery stores.
BBC Earth reports that US consumers return about 3.5 billion products a year, of which only 20% are actually defective. And, according to New Yorker research, the total value of returned goods in the U.S. alone is estimated at nearly a trillion dollars. That is more than the GDP of many countries.
So, what happens to a shirt that doesn’t fit, or that expensive gadget you returned after a bad case of buyer’s remorse? Ideally, they will be inspected for damage or defects, and either returned to stock with an open-box discount or disposed of responsibly. But what actually happens is stranger and, perhaps predictably, more pointless.
Investigating Amazon’s return pipeline will lead you into an endless black hole of vast warehouses full of endless, unwanted goods and bulk mystery boxes, as well as billions of pounds of landfill waste. Although products are recycled in some cases, such as with Amazon resale warehouses, they are the exception to the rule. Here’s what you need to know before you send back your Amazon purchases.
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An unfortunate number of returns end up in landfills
Heavy equipment moves waste to landfill – Mayy Contributor/Shutterstock
According to returns management firm Optoro, 8.4 billion pounds of returns were junked across all retailers in 2023. And it’s not just broken or defective items. In 2021, an ITV report revealed that Amazon was marking a quota of 200,000 items per week for destruction in just one warehouse. From some great headphones to books and the occasional MacBook or iPad, the items were placed in boxes called ‘waste’. By comparison, fewer than 30,000 items were donated. Amazon said in a statement that the company destroyed an “extremely small” amount of goods. To be fair, programs like Amazon Renewed do resell discounted products in some cases.
However, Amazon sending items to landfills in bulk is a surefire way to attract negative attention. Furthermore, the waste footprint for returns goes far beyond the items themselves. Transporting them back through Amazon’s reverse logistics chain uses fuel and labor. At the scale at which Amazon processes returns, it’s also incredibly expensive. Increasingly, Amazon has used a different solution: It simply tells unhappy shoppers to keep the products and ignore the return issue. What this means is that the task of trashing objects is offloaded to the consumer. It’s a win-win for Amazon, which dodges heat for wasteful practices while saving the money it would cost to landfill the items themselves. And since 14% of returns last year were fraudulent, Amazon won’t be sorting through the stones it puts in the iPhone box. It is unclear what percentage of refunds were destroyed, donated, or not requested as of 2025.
Many Amazon returns are sold in bulk at liquidation warehouses
A ware filled with loosely stacked cardboard boxes – LukeandKarla.Travel/Shutterstock
One of the strangest fates of Amazon item returns is liquidation. Since many items cannot be repackaged by Amazon or the seller, they are sold to liquidation companies for pennies on the dollar. These organizations buy our e-commerce jetsam and resell it in bulk, and the liquidation industry has ballooned to $644 billion by early 2022, according to a CNBC report. A web search for “liquidation center near me” can turn up many such locations, depending on where you live. Go into one, and you’ll find a huge warehouse full of huge, poorly labeled boxes, each filled with… stuff. They’re essentially mystery boxes, which means you can pay hundreds of dollars for one and find thousands worth of items, or you can find a bunch of random junk that you don’t need and have no chance of reselling.
It is impossible to say how much of the goods that reach the liquidation center will be rehomed. Pallets are often picked up by resellers who flip what they can and keep the rest. While liquidation is certainly better than a straight trip to the trash heap, in many cases, liquidators aren’t necessarily saving items from the landfill so much as adding more steps to the process.
But believe it or not, Amazon is actually one good In terms of companies restocking or reclaiming returned items, regarding the opportunities it offers, thanks to both its vast data and logistics operations and business partnerships. The economy is set up in favor of customers, who demand an endless supply of cheap goods and easy returns, but it is not set up to distribute this savings efficiently.
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Read the original article on SlashGear.
