What really happens to the clothes we send back : NPR

MANOUSH ZOMORODI, HOST:

It’s the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I’m Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the State of Fashion, which, of course, includes shopping. And for many of us today, that means shopping online.

APARNA MEHTA: I have shopped for every single thing online. Anything and everything that I can purchase, I look at it online first.

ZOMORODI: This is Aparna Mehta. A few years ago, when she was a busy working mom, online shopping was a huge time-saver, especially for buying clothes.

MEHTA: I work 12 to 16 hours a day. I don’t have time during the week to go out and look for things.

ZOMORODI: So in the evenings, she’d scroll and shop.

MEHTA: My daughter’s in bed. I’m relaxed. I’m watching TV. I start browsing. I – like, hmm, you know, let’s look at Nordstroms today. Let’s look at Anthropologie. What do they have there? I’ll start seeing these things, and I’m like, oh, that looks really good. And wherever I would go on any website, they would say returns are free. I would intentionally buy the same item in a couple different colors, a couple different sizes with the intent of keeping only one.

ZOMORODI: I mean, that’s what I’ve been told as well is, like, you know, you’re a busy person. You’re a mom. Save time. Just order it in various sizes, then ship back the ones you don’t want, and that’s perfectly fine. Is that what you understood as well?

MEHTA: Yes. I mean, I would try on six, seven, five, six, whatever, and then keep one if I liked it and return the rest.

ZOMORODI: At your peak, how many deliveries would you say you were getting of clothes per week?

MEHTA: Oh – per week? – 12, 15.

ZOMORODI: Whoa.

MEHTA: Sorry.

ZOMORODI: You were serious.

MEHTA: But I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. Look, the store is making it possible for me to order as many as I want and return back what I don’t want. Sometimes I would return all of them because you can’t check the material when you’re buying online. My daughter, she was a teenager at that time, and she said, mom, you have a real problem. And this is a daughter telling me.

ZOMORODI: (Laughter).

MEHTA: I’m supposed to be telling her, but it was instead her.

ZOMORODI: Aparna’s shopping habit was definitely out of control. And she started to realize that it was a problem for the environment, too.

MEHTA: There were packages showing up at my doorstep almost every day. I have all these empty boxes. I mean, yeah, I recycle it, but – oh, my God – so much cardboard.

ZOMORODI: And there’s some irony here because at the time, Aparna was a global solutions director for UPS. Part of her job was to help retailers make their operations run more smoothly, so she knew a lot about how shipping works.

MEHTA: So think about supply chain design, supply chain optimization, carbon impact analysis. That’s the kind of work I did.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: But one day, in a meeting with a client, she heard a statistic that put her shopping habit in perspective.

MEHTA: I was at a meeting with one of our largest retailers. You know, one of the key members from the customer side said, the largest opportunity we have right now is with returns. Last year, they had 7.5 million pieces of clothing returned to them.

ZOMORODI: Wow.

MEHTA: I just circled that number on my paper. I’m like, oh, my God. In one year, one retailer – this is not a small problem. This is a big one.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

AMANDA MULL: The return situation online, it is a problem entirely of the internet’s making and of internet retailers’ making.

ZOMORODI: Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, where she covers consumerism.

MULL: The idea that you go into a store and plan already to just return half of it, that is a behavior that, before the internet, was considered, like, pretty maladaptive. Like…

ZOMORODI: (Laughter).

MULL: If you were doing that regularly, that would be sort of, like, characterized as, like, a compulsive shopping issue. But now that is just how the internet has trained us to shop.

ZOMORODI: Amanda says that when people buy things online, they tend to return them at a very high rate.

MULL: On average, brick-and-mortar stores have, like, a single-digit return rate. Online, it can range from usually 15- to 30%. And for certain types of products, especially during the holidays, it can get up to 50%. And that’s because online shopping is not designed to produce good decisions in the people…

ZOMORODI: (Laughter).

MULL: …Who are making purchases. It’s designed to make it as easy for you to buy things as possible.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: This all began back in the early 2000s, when online shopping debuted, and shoppers were skeptical.

MULL: People understood really well at the time that a lot of the goods that they wanted to buy just weren’t ideal for online shopping – things that you have to try on, things that have to fit your body, things that have to be comfortable in some way. Like, there’s all kinds of stuff that you just can’t really know with full certainty online, and you still can’t. You certainly couldn’t in, you know, 2004. So early online retailers had to figure out some way to overcome these objections in order to encourage people to change their habits.

ZOMORODI: Enter Zappos, the online shoe store and the first online retailer to offer free returns.

MULL: Ending up with a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit is, like, a big risk. So they made returns free. That is what got people to shop online. That is what created this set of habits in people. It also was really, really unprofitable for the companies doing it. Amazon, Zappos, a lot of early online retailers did not turn a profit for a very long time. Like, they were investing money in creating habits in the American population that would, in the long term, be advantageous to them.

ZOMORODI: Has it worked, would you say?

MULL: Yeah, it’s worked really, really well, because it’s created these behaviors that, you know, a lot of people have now, like, buying a size up, and a size down from what you’d normally buy or adding something random to your order to get past a free shipping threshold. They created a set of incentives for shoppers for people to buy stuff with the intent of returning it, because if people didn’t really start trusting this process and start seeing it as convenient, they were never going to peel off a considerable amount of, like, market share from in-person retailers.

ZOMORODI: Shoppers came to rely on that online convenience, exactly as retailers had hoped. But now as we buy and return, buy and return, the cost of processing all those packages is hurting retailers’ bottom line.

MULL: Last fall, I went to visit a returns facility run by Inmar Intelligence, which is the largest returns processor in the United States. They process hundreds of millions of packages per year in their different facilities across the U.S. The one that I went to was one of their big ones. It’s a few hours outside of New York City. It’s a sort of a regional facility that collects a lot of returns from the sort of, like, New York City, Philadelphia, Metropolitan area.

ZOMORODI: So I’ve probably sent something back to this warehouse without even knowing it.

MULL: Oh, almost certainly. Almost certainly.

ZOMORODI: This one facility processes about 100,000 packages a day.

MULL: It is just like a perpetual motion machine of taking stuff out of your taped-up poly mailer and figuring out what’s going on.

ZOMORODI: A real live person opens each package.

MULL: They try to ensure that what you’ve returned matches what it says on your order.

ZOMORODI: They check the product for defects.

MULL: For signs that it has been used.

ZOMORODI: They even have to do things that are kind of gross.

MULL: Especially if it’s apparel, they’re supposed to sniff it.

ZOMORODI: Sniff it.

MULL: Yes.

ZOMORODI: Like smell?

MULL: Yes. To see if it smells like it’s been worn. If you return a pair of pants, they check the pockets.

(LAUGHTER)

MULL: The guy who was showing me around told me that the most common item to find with returned pants is somebody’s underwear.

ZOMORODI: Oh.

MULL: Yeah.

ZOMORODI: No.

MULL: Not great.

ZOMORODI: No. Like, that seems, like, pretty time consuming.

MULL: Oh, yeah. It’s really, really time consuming and labor intensive. And, you know, Inmar and its competitors all have technologically advanced systems that use whatever, you know, machine learning or AI capabilities they can, but, like, there is no replacement for human eyes and human noses and human hands.

ZOMORODI: After that, sometimes clothes do go back to the retailer and are resold. But Amanda says there’s a very high bar for getting clothes back on the shelf.

MULL: Some retailers only take back things that are in perfect, like new, unworn condition, sometimes in their original packaging.

ZOMORODI: Otherwise, the item might go to an outlet, like TJ Maxx. But again…

MULL: If there’s any indication that something has been worn, it is very hard to resell anything like that in any channel.

ZOMORODI: So instead, it might be donated or recycled.

MULL: But textile recycling is, like, pretty difficult. The more like embellishments, the more types of material there are on a garment, the less likely it is to be easily recyclable. So not everything can be recycled. Not everything that’s donated can be used. And pretty much everything that can’t be slotted into one of those categories is destroyed in some way. It is incinerated, landfilled. At every step, this process just sort of sheds waste.

ZOMORODI: It’s funny. It’s reminding me of a time that I tried to return something to Amazon, and they were like, you know what? Just keep it. We’ll give you your money back.

MULL: Yes.

ZOMORODI: At that point, what’s happening? They’re making a calculation that it’s not worth it for this?

MULL: Yes, absolutely. Returns, on a per-return basis, can cost retailers anywhere $5 to 25. Especially fast fashion has a really short shelf life. That becomes a real problem when taking returns because maybe it takes you a week or two weeks to actually drop it off at the post office. Maybe it takes a full month for you to drop it off at the post office. When a company takes that return, like, your dress might not have been available for sale in any capacity on their website for two weeks by the time it gets back to them and gets processed. So there’s no way for them to resell it, and they’ve had to pay a returns processor to look at it. They’ve had to pay the logistic service to bring it back to them. They have already just been leaking money. So the last thing they want to do is take a return.

ZOMORODI: So what would happen though if each of us just returned a few fewer items per year?

MULL: Well, I mean, we’re about to find out. A lot of retailers are trying to change the system ever so slightly to prevent us from returning so much stuff because it has started to eat into their bottom line. And if they want to, you know, extract the profit that they’ve spent so much time encouraging us to create, then they need us to return less stuff. Like, they have set up a system that is not inherently profitable anymore. So this reintroduction of returns fees, of restocking fees, of shipping fees, of the concept of the final sale, and you can’t return something, I think does make a meaningful difference in the amount of stuff that people return. The system is in, like, a state of flux right now. They are trying to figure out the correct combination of incentives and fees to institute in order to keep more products sold.

You know, I have been writing about retail logistics and returns for a long time now. And every time I get in a conversation with somebody about it, I see people have this feeling of horror that you’ve just discovered that you’ve been participating in something that you don’t feel good about. You really start to think about, like all the times that you procrastinated taking a package to UPS. And I think sometimes people feel a little bit dumb for not thinking about it, but, like, the system is designed to ensure that they don’t think about it as much as possible.

ZOMORODI: We’ve talked about, you know, the problems for these businesses. But what about the environmental impact? Is there any way to calculate just how bad the problem is?

MULL: So there is this EPA stat that gets thrown around a lot, which is that the average U.S. consumer throws out approximately 81.5 pounds of clothes annually. That doesn’t mean that, like, every single person is taking 81 pounds of clothing to the trash. But it means that for every American, the amount of textile waste that gets created within this country is about 81 pounds. That works out to a little bit over 11 million tons as a country. And it’s like, yes, returns create a real issue and a real waste in the process, but the much bigger waste is just the volume at which these companies manufacture clothing that nobody wants or needs and nobody buys.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MULL: I think that’s even more the case for the slightly older-model fast-fashion retailers, where you’re creating a lot more stuff up front to see if it sells. And that is the cost of doing business at that volume, at that scale. There are dumping grounds all over the world in poor countries, where a lot of these – this cast-off clothing tends to go. In Ghana – in Chile, in particular – just sort of, like, these trash mountains of clothing, which just, I think, illustrates, like, the real overproduction problem that we have in these types of goods. You know, that much is thrown away every year as a country, and we’re not missing any of it.

ZOMORODI: I mean, as someone who’s tracking this, you must have imagined what could be done systemically to make a difference. What would that look like?

MULL: I think it’s regulatory. There is a real capacity for responsible regulation and responsible oversight to change the behaviors of these companies. But, you know, the companies that populate this industry are very, very powerful. They have very powerful lobbying arms.

ZOMORODI: Yeah.

MULL: The Biden administration has made some important steps in the past few years, but it’s hard to say exactly how much anybody is going to be willing to do.

ZOMORODI: All right. So I’d love to end our conversation with sort of best practices. Let’s say someone is like, well, I am not going to be part of this online shopping machine that is hurting our planet. What are some of the things they can do?

MULL: I think one of the best things that you can do is, when you decide you want or need something, to try to buy it second hand. I think that if you’re looking at a system, where you’ve got just, like, this massive oversupply of consumer products, then it makes sense, both systemically and just, like, price-wise, for you to look for, you know, opportunities to buy something that is not brand-new. But we live in a consumer economy, and the system is set up to prompt us to buy as much as possible. Like, that’s the economy we have. And, like, the amount of, like, personal resilience you need to say no to that all the time is just enormous. Like, nobody can be expected to say no to these prompts a hundred percent of the time.

You have been, as a consumer, sort of, like, herded toward the least friction possible. If you can add some friction back in for yourself in whatever way makes sense for you and what you’re looking for, then you’re probably going to make better decisions. You’re going to save money. You’re going to be less wasteful. Your house is going to be less cluttered. Like, you are just going to have an easier time of things in the long run.

ZOMORODI: Which brings us back to Aparna Mehta, the now-retired UPS executive and former online shopaholic. As Aparna learned more and more about where her online returns were actually going, she knew she had to make a change.

MEHTA: Because I saw the wastage that happens in the supply chain. You think about the amount of fuel you consume. You’re talking about labor. You know, every time you touch a package, it’s a cost.

ZOMORODI: As a supply chain expert, Aparna focused on solutions to reduce this kind of waste. She worked with her retail clients to optimize their shipping routes, consolidate shipments and use less packaging.

MEHTA: And you start thinking about your supply chain in different ways.

ZOMORODI: In her own life, she joined a clothing reuse initiative within the Indian American community. But most of all, Aparna changed the way she shops.

MEHTA: Yes, significantly. It takes me a lot longer now to make a decision when I’m doing online shopping. I really think about it. I’ll put the item in the cart. I’ll go back the next day and see if I still want it. And I try very hard to keep the returns to a minimum. I don’t buy with the intent to return, so that’s the No. 1 change. I don’t buy multiple items of the same item with the intent of only keeping one. That’s like my way of saying, I’m going to minimize this as much as I can.

ZOMORODI: I mean, there’s also the question of fashion, right?

MEHTA: Yep.

ZOMORODI: That – were you very sort of trendy previously when you were shopping more often? Were you more up on style? And have you decided to go – I don’t know – more classic or go back into your closet?

MEHTA: No. So that part hasn’t changed, unfortunately.

(LAUGHTER)

ZOMORODI: OK.

MEHTA: I still like trendy stuff. What I don’t do is I don’t buy fast fashion. So if I purchase stuff, it is to keep. I take some time to buy. My daughter and I, we have a phrase. She points to her heart, and she says, mom, does it hurt you here if you don’t get that? And I say, no. She goes, OK, then don’t buy it (laughter).

ZOMORODI: That was Aparna Mehta, former vice president of global customer solutions at UPS. You can see her talk at ted.com. We also heard from Amanda Mull, who writes for Bloomberg Businessweek. And on our next TED Radio Hour+ episode, you can get more expert advice from Amanda on how to be an intentional consumer. She’s got some great tips.

Today on the show, the State of Fashion. It’s the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I’m Manoush Zomorodi. Stay with us.

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