Commentary
I read a disheartening report recently from Optoro (a reverse logistics company that
helps major retailers manage their returns) that claimed that, annually in the U.S.,
about five billion pounds of returned merchandise ends up in landfills.
Each year, consumers return about $380 billion worth of goods. Only half of returns
make it back onto shelves and about a quarter of items are returned to the manufacturer.
Others go to secondary retailers or are sold for pennies on the dollar to liquidators and
discounters before ending up at regional wholesalers, who send the goods to pawn shops,
dollar stores or even out of the country. However, Optoro stated that if it’s cheaper for
the retailer to throw out returned goods rather than try to resell them, the goods end up
in the dumpster.
This made me rethink my personal habits. Growing up, my mother kept every single
unwanted gift that entered our house, so they piled up. She didn’t drive and my father
wasn’t about to take the car out of the garage just to return gifts. If you didn’t like it,
you lumped it. My mother also thought that re-gifting was tacky and that yard sales were
a waste of time, so 43 years of accumulated gifts for all ages found their way to backs of
closets, coal bin shelves and under beds. Luckily we had a really big house.
When we cleaned it out after my parents passed away, the amount of stuff was staggering.
Surely, somebody somewhere could have used all of those clothes, gadgets, tools,
books about football and now-expired perfumes and lotions even if we couldn’t. We
donated what we could out of my parents’ house, but two dumpsters worth had to be
discarded.
I swore I would never run my household that way and had been adamant about returning
unwanted presents, without thinking where they ended up, as long as they didn’t end
up at the back of my closets. After reading this report, however, I started to think differently.
Yes, I could return all of my unwanted Christmas presents and get something else
or I could just donate them to my charity of choice, who show up every January anyway to
pick up all of the items in our house that had been replaced/upgraded by Santa. Why not
just make the donation pile a little bigger and save myself all that running around? Not
to mention, possibly keeping completely usable things out of the landfill just because the
tags are removed or the box is crushed. After all, someone can use it…
SPRAY knows there are fillers and others in the aerosol industry who donate “slightly
imperfect” products to charity and we applaud them. Imagine if this happened on a
grander scale across multiple industries? If we could reduce that five billion pounds in
the landfill to even 4.5 billion pounds, then many more not-for-profits would have even
further resources at hand with much less waste for the world to deal with.
To clarify…
Our thanks to Steve Sanchez of Aeropres Corp. and VP of the Western Aerosol Information
Bureau (WAIB), who wrote in to remind readers that, although he enjoyed Pierce
Pillon’s Guest Commentary in SPRAY’s January 2018 issue, the Southern Aerosol Technical
Association (SATA) is not, in fact, the oldest regional aerosol association. Sanchez
affirms that indeed WAIB was the first spin-off of the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers
Association (CSMA—now the HCPA), forming in 1976 and incorporating in 1978,
three years before SATA. Thanks to both Pillon and Sanchez for keeping newer industry
members both informed and engaged.
6 Spray February 2018
SPRAYTechnology & Marketing
Cynthia Hundley
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Production
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Volume 28, No. 2 February, 2018
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From dumpster
to donation pile…