Buy. Return. Repeat … What really happens when we send back unwanted clothes?
In the past, the post office has been an embarrassing place for Megan Hitt. The 25-year-old nurse from south Wales recalls a time, a few years ago, when she had to approach the counter with six different Asos parcels in her arms, her “shopping addiction exposed for everyone to see”. Since university, Hitt has been a prolific online shopper – buying several outfits at a time, picking one to keep and returning the rest. This time, when she handed over her parcels to be scanned, she was ashamed that there were so many. Still, she knew she would be back soon – she already had another Asos order on the way.
Buying and returning clothes online is part of the fabric of modern life. For years, Hitt didn’t think much about it: “I used to buy and return like it didn’t matter.” At her worst, she’d order three parcels a week; sometimes, if she knew she’d wear something only once, on a night out, she’d keep the tags on and send it back. “It was something we all used to do,” Hitt says of her university days. “In a house of six girls, four did it all the time.”
In the UK, customers return £7bn of internet purchases every year, while more than a fifth of all clothes bought online are sent back. Across the globe, return rates are typically higher when customers shop online – in the US, 8-10% of sales from physical shops are returned, while 20-30% of e-commerce purchases ultimately rebound. Rising returns during the cost of living crisis are troubling retailers; in the spring of 2022, fast fashion retailer Boohoo blamed an increase in returns for a 94% slump in pre-tax profits.
The returns problem is now so widespread that there is a specialist organisation dedicated to studying it: the Product Returns Research Group (PRRG) at the University of Southampton. Regina Frei, a professor of operations and supply chain management who leads the group, has found that it costs companies £11 to deal with the return of an £89 item, in a situation when 20% of orders come back. Frei has also spoken to warehouse workers and discovered that many businesses don’t know the real reasons products are sent back – 70% of returns are logged as a “change of mind” by the customer, partly because this is the first thing that workers can click on their drop-down menus.
“A lot of retailers are not aware of the full scale of the returns problem,” Frei says. “There is often a lack of strategy in how to deal with returns.” Lisa Jack, a professor of accounting and a member of the PRRG, says the situation is escalating to the point where “it could wipe out any profits companies make selling goods”.
Yet the returns phenomenon does not just affect retailers – it has had a knock-on effect across the economy, and in some ways has created its own shadow economy. There are cleaners who revive the returned clothes, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, seamstresses, packaging manufacturers and waste management companies whose jobs arguably exist because we just can’t stop sending stuff back. Entire new businesses have sprung up or expanded to deal with – and feed off – our returns obsession.
It’s partly why Hitt is now a lot less embarrassed when she sends unwanted parcels back. “Now they’ve got the InPost lockers where you don’t even have to see anybody,” she says. “You can just take the parcel and scan the QR code.” In November 2022, InPost reported record year-on-year growth, proudly noting that 46% of residents in London, Birmingham and Manchester were “within a seven-minute walk” of an InPost locker.
The shadow economy also partly explains how Hitt’s shopping habit became so intense. She admits that, as a student, “I always needed to have something different on in every Instagram photo, I never would have worn something again.” But she also points the finger at delayed-payment app Klarna. In 2019, Asos began collaborating with the Swedish fintech company, which allows customers to pay for their products 30 days after they “buy” them.
“If we had something on the weekend, we’d Klarna four different outfits, see which we liked the most and send them all back,” Hitt says. “You wouldn’t even be waiting on the return money because you never paid for it in the first place.” The official Klarna website boasts: “Paying after delivery allows you to try before you buy.”
InPost and Klarna are just two businesses that benefit from customers such as Hitt. Yet traditional retailers are left vulnerable by rising returns. “It affects the company’s bottom line, so it can lead to a lot of losses,” Frei says. “It can contribute to retailers having to shut down branches, high streets getting more deserted.”
Our penchant for returning stuff both creates jobs and jeopardises them; benefits businesses and threatens them. For individual retailers, the costs can be astronomical, but for the planet, the costs are even higher. When you pull out a sticky label and slap it on the front of your parcel, your return is technically free – but what is the price we really pay? What is the true cost of the return economy?
* * *
Here is what many of us assume happens when we order a dress, frown, sigh, put it back in two layers of plastic packaging and send it back. The dress arrives at a warehouse. It is rebagged in an unripped plastic packet. It is put back on a shelf. Somewhere, a hopeful person who entered their email address in a “notify me when back in stock” box gets a life-changing ping, and the dress lives happily ever after in its new home.
This, Frei says, is very often not what happens. “If it’s not in perfect condition, if there is a delay in the shipping or in the processing, or if you keep it for quite a long time before returning it, then it’s not going to be resold,” Frei says. Third-party returns platform Optoro estimates that only 50% of returns will be.
Frei says most consumers are not aware of the environmental impact of returns. One logistics firm put the carbon dioxide cost of returns in the US as being equivalent to the output of 3m cars. Even if the dress you sent back isn’t thrown away, selling it on is also costly for the environment. There’s the transport, of course, and often clothes are “wrapped in paper and a plastic bag that need to be replaced, and if it’s something that’s easily crinkled, it needs to be steamed”.
According to anti-waste charity the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, one truckload of clothing is sent to a landfill or burned every second. The Atacama desert in Chile has become a dumping ground for 39,000 tonnes of unsold clothes a year from around the world – piled high and stretched as far as the eye can see, these textiles leak pollutants into local water and sometimes catch fire in the heat. Even before we consider the environmental impact of sending these unwanted clothes across the globe, fashion production is responsible for between 2% and 8% of global carbon emissions.
While many companies have mastered “forward logistics” – designing, making, packing and shipping their product as efficiently as possible – “reverse logistics” are messier. This leads to further waste, as stock is updated based on what is sold, meaning companies manufacture more of a product that’s ultimately sent back.
Without efficient reverse logistics models, businesses often sell stock on to “jobbers” who bulk-buy returns in pallets without knowing what’s inside or what state the goods are in. “Even then, a large percentage of it will probably go to waste,” Frei says, “and there is even more transport and packaging.”
* * *
One solution is for retailers to develop circular business models, getting the maximum use out of their products by repairing or recycling them. Andrew Rough is the chief executive of Advanced Clothing Solutions (ACS), a 25year-old clothing rental company based in Scotland that expanded its services in 2019 to repair and resell returned clothes for high street brands.
In recent years, Rough says things have been “growing really quickly” as brands wake up to the importance of circular solutions. Yet not everyone is on board. “We’ve tried to speak to fastfashion houses, but a lot of them didn’t really want to engage with us, sadly,” he says. It’s easy to see why – cheap clothes have a reputation for falling apart in the wash. Rough says ACS has helped a number of companies become both more sustainable and more profitable, but there is still a way to go. “We’ve got to change the mindset that clothing is stock. It is assets. And those assets will have many users over their lifetime.”
ACS is housed in a huge site near Motherwell that processes over 6m clothing items a year and in peak (read: wedding) season employs 250 people. When I visit in March I can see why some employees – known as “garment longevity specialists” – compare the sprawling facility to the factory in Monsters, Inc. In the movie, bedroom doors travel up and down mechanised rails; here, dry cleaning bags flit past overhead, each tagged to track the shirt or dress inside. Walk up to the second floor of the warehouse and you have to dodge out of the way of the steady stream of bags as the pleasant smell of steam wafts over from the dry cleaning area.
Before it is eventually rehired or resold, a returned piece of clothing makes numerous stops in the ACS facility. After being unwrapped, assessed and blasted in an ozone sanitisation station that looks not unlike the inside of a truck, a damaged item will make its way to dry cleaning supervisor Angela Grant, a veteran with 28 years’ experience. At her “spot cleaning station”, Grant works to remove every stain you could possibly imagine – a laminated guide tells her the exact amount of solution to put on everything from felt tip pen to vomit. Coloured bottles hold the different solutions: you need a splash from the red bottle and the green bottle to get out a mustard stain, while you’d need to pour from the red, green, blue and yellow bottles to remove jam.
“If you get a dress, at the top there will be fake tan and makeup stains,”
Grant says. “Down the middle it will be food stains and at the bottom – if it’s a long dress – it will be trailed in the dirt. That’s how I always assess it.” Grant often finds chewing gum in pockets, and inside the lining are the kind of stains you don’t want to ask about. Red wine is the hardest thing to get out.
Then there are washing machines, dryers and trouser presses the size of single beds, but it is at the repairs station where seamstresses work tirelessly to make old clothes look new. There is a special, sturdy sewing machine to repair rips in denim and an entire wall of buttons, boxed up by brand in clear plastic containers or in the occasional Celebrations and Quality Street tub.
“I repair all of it – dresses, trousers, jeans, jackets, waterproof clothes, everything that you wish,” says Alicja Białaszczyk, a 41-year-old repair specialist who has worked at ACS for a year after leaving her job as a care community worker. Before she came to the UK 14 years ago, Białaszczyk studied clothes design in Poland. “It’s very artistic,” she says of her ACS work: if she has four of the same dress to repair but the right buttons, zips or sequins aren’t available, she uses one dress to repair the other three. “When you finish something, you feel happy,” she says. “I feel like it’s worth it when we think about the environment.” The job has even changed Białaszczyk’s own habits: “I’ve stopped shopping now!”
Once the job is done, the clothing is either sent back to the retailer to resell, or ACS photograph it and list it on eBay on the brand’s behalf. In the far corner of the warehouse is a government-accredited centre where employees can get qualifications in textile care and fashion logistics; there are conference desks and chairs, a line of computers and information stuck on the walls just as in any other classroom. Euan Mcgeehan is a 26-year-old former cinema worker who has completed an apprenticeship and gained a Scottish vocational qualification since he joined ACS 18 months ago. Mcgeehan currently takes photos of clothes for resale, but has been trained to work in various departments.
“Before, I had no idea how much stuff goes to waste and how much you can salvage,” he says. Mcgeehan deals with a huge variety of clothing for resale – a Dolce & Gabbana hair