Hundreds of millions of people shop online every day; about a quarter return one or more items. This creates close to 10.5 million tons of textiles being disposed of in landfills every year, making this reusable item one of the least recycled commodities in America. These statistics across the entirety of the globe are bound to be far more astronomical. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly common for people to shop online from the convenience of their homes, rather than going out to stores or malls in-person. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, I think I do online shopping around twice as much as I did before, because we couldn’t go out due to pandemic restrictions and safety concerns, and there were still things we needed,” says Tahya Mumtahi ’23. This has led to not only an increase in the numbers of clothes being sold, but also the number of returns increasing by just as much — or even more. 

Often, people use the bracketing strategy to shop: this is when consumers purchase the same article of clothing in one size up and one size down, in addition to the size that they think will fit. 

Doing this almost always guarantees that you will get the clothing in a size that fits you. After you receive the clothes, you try on the clothes and find which ones fit. Then, you would return the other two sizes or all three of them because they all don’t fit or you just don’t like how the piece of clothing looks. That’s the end of it, for you.

Those clothes, on the other hand, have a whole process of being thrown out ahead of them.

“I think the clothes that I return go to the sale or clearance section, or they just get thrown away,” said Susan Ye ’23.  Another student, Kirsten Moy ’23, said, “I think most of the returned clothing items would be thoroughly sanitized and then sent back to the store, or they would simply be sent to another online buyer.” 

What the students said can likely apply for a large portion of our general population. This goes to show how we don’t really know a lot about what are the environmental effects of what we do in our everyday lives. 

According to the article ‘Where Does Discarded Clothing Go?’ in The Atlantic Monthly, in NYC, the clothes thrown away accounts for more than 6 percent of all garbage and is estimated to be about 193,000 tons. Nationally, these numbers are greater. Americans donate or recycle only about 15 percent of their old clothing, meaning that 10.5 million tons of clothes are thrown away every year. 

H&M, a popular clothing brand, has admitted to burning 15 millions tons of clothes every year because they weren’t in “fit condition” to be resold. In reality, businesses like H&M burn the clothes because they don’t want to use more laborious and expensive alternatives. 

One example of such alternatives would be to sterilize all of the clothes and to resell them, which is a very costly process. One business told CNBC that they made about $400 million in net sales last year, but had to pay $385 million for the return items. This is the case for many businesses; if they want to make a profit, discarding returns would be much easier for them than to resell the items.

The process of going through the returns, making sure everything is there, and inspecting for any damages on the item all cost a lot of time and money. Businesses are already losing money from the start of this process due to paying for the shipment of products, and paying for the shipment of the returned items. Plus, the price of an item depreciates the moment that it is opened. 

Although there is no way to stop online shopping altogether, we as consumers should be aware of its harmful environmental effects and make efforts within our ability to mitigate them.

One possible solution would be to give the clothes to people instead of returning them. Since it is unreasonable to keep clothes that you’re not going to wear and we should avoid returning clothes, giving the clothes to people you know who need them would be a good alternative.

Another possible solution would be to buy clothes that you are confident in wearing for years and won’t just throw away after a few months or a year. This would be helpful because it is not only online shopping returns that are harming the environment, but also the clothes that everyday people throw out, which significantly adds to the environmental impact. 

Hundreds of millions of people shop online every day; about a quarter return one or more items. This creates close to 10.5 million tons of textiles being disposed of in landfills every year, making this reusable item one of the least recycled commodities in America.