Holiday Shopping Returns Have a High Environmental Cost. Here’s How Consumers Can Help

In the U.S., around 15 percent of purchases made during the holiday season are returned.

As the holidays quickly approach, the last-minute scramble to get presents for everyone on your list can be a bit of a guessing game. Will your mom like the blue or green mug? Does your brother wear a large or extra-large shirt? Will your partner actually use the coffee maker you’re thinking about ordering them? 

The widespread ease and availability of online shopping presents a rather simple solution to these internal debates: Just buy every option and return the rejects later. In the United States, roughly 15 percent of purchases made during the holiday season are returned. 

However, free returns can come at a high environmental cost. Research shows the transportation and processing associated with sending a product back to the supplier jacks up its carbon footprint, and oftentimes, a slew of returns end up in landfills rather than back on the market. 

In the face of this online shopping frenzy, experts have called on companies in recent years to modify both their online shopping experiences and “reverse supply chains” to reduce emissions—and they’re urging consumers to rethink gift-giving. 

Holiday Shopping Sprees: A few psychological factors fuel the online shopping craze during the holiday season. Research shows that social media and extravagant advertisements, like those shown around Christmas, can trigger feelings of social comparison that may lead “people towards excessive consumption in an attempt to compensate for emotional dissatisfaction,” Byungdoo Kim, a research associate at the Centre for Sustainable Business at King’s College London, wrote in a recent post. 

Also adding to the shopping drive: Limited-time deals and seasonal sales tap into individuals’ fear of missing out (otherwise known as FOMO) and push them to make purchases they believe involve rare savings—a feeling that marketing campaigns are intentionally targeting, according to a 2016 study. 

In many cases—most often when buying clothes—people will get multiple sizes or colors of an item to try them on and return the ones they do not like. Even “green consumers” who are aware of the environmental costs of online shopping increase consumption during the holiday season. This behavior is part of the reason that researchers estimate returns from online purchases are double to quadruple those in a physical store. A new report from the National Retail Federation projects that consumers will return around $890 billion worth of products in 2024. 

While companies are increasingly streamlining their production lines to reduce carbon emissions before a product reaches the consumer, the carbon footprint of the “reverse supply chain” that occurs after a person returns an item is a bit of a black box, according to a 2021 comment published in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

“Information for product returns related to online shopping supply chains, transport, routes and quantities is insufficient, making it difficult to monitor the carbon emissions of this process,” the paper’s authors wrote. “The true value of the environmental burden is thus unknown.” 

Some studies suggest that inefficiencies and volume of returns can add up to over 30 percent of the carbon emissions of the initial deliveries. A 2023 report found that transporting returns generated more than 15 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually from the U.S. alone. That’s equivalent to the carbon produced by almost 3.5 million gas-powered cars in a full year. 

Often it is cheaper for companies to throw away a product than try to resell it, so much of this inventory is donated or ends up in landfills around the world. People in the U.S. generate more waste in December than in any other month, CBS News reports. 

Curbing Returns: Sales during Cyber Week—the deal-heavy shopping stint starting on Thanksgiving—reached record highs this November. An Adobe Analytics analysis of e-commerce throughout the five-day period revealed consumers spent a total of $13.3 billion on “Cyber Monday,” and online sales are expected to continue surging through the rest of the holiday season. 

But returns are rarely as well-tracked, the 2021 comment finds. Businesses must improve product return data collection to get a better sense of the true emission burden associated with them, the authors write. They add that companies can reduce returns by improving a shopper’s experience with more detailed and specific descriptions of the product.

“Companies should be transparent and realistic about qualities such as the aesthetics and performance of products to avoid false expectation,” the authors write. 

Individuals can also help stem the flood of returns following the holiday season. According to sustainability experts, one of the simplest solutions is to make sure people actually want the gift you are planning to buy them through detailed wish lists. 

“I’ve found that older family members are particularly resistant to this because it goes against their ideas about gift-giving,” Laura Wittig, co-founder of the conscious consumerism brand Brightly, told Fast Company in 2021. “But over time people get used to it and appreciate it.”

Alternatively, people can eliminate the waste-filled return risk altogether by gifting experiences rather than products. 

“Christmas doesn’t need to be defined by consumption to feel special,” Kim writes. “By making a few mindful and sustainable choices, we can fill our holidays with more meaning, joy, and connection.” 

Cover photo:

Shoppers at a mall in Massachusetts. Credit: John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images