Sent Packing

You may track your incoming packages pretty closely. But most of us ignore the much longer, more circuitous trip that begins when we return something. What happens after you drop off your package might surprise you. Amanda Mull in The Atlantic (Gift Article): This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want. “When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.”

+ Sometimes we return stuff right away. Other times, we wear an item a few times before tossing it. “When you purchase an item of clothing from a fast fashion brand, the likelihood is that you’ll wear it just seven times before throwing it away.” Because of this, many big, fast fashion outlets have created a program that lets consumers drop off the clothes they’re done with. “It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that when a garment is returned to a store as part of a take-back program that it either be used to make another item or, if it’s in bad condition, shredded into textile fibers and used for insulation. The reality, however, is complicated—and can be far more insidious. When a green skirt was returned to an H&M store on Oxford Street in central London in 2022, the hope was, as a sign on the shop floor read, “to close the loop” and contribute to a circular fashion system. Instead, that same skirt traveled 15,467 miles across the world through the United Arab Emirates SOEX processing facility only to be dumped in a vacant lot in Bamako, Mali, five months later, according to research by the Changing Markets Foundation.” Why One H&M Skirt Traveled 15,000 Miles After It Was Brought Back to the Store.