Renow and Ninyes

My heavy duty home laser printer (HP) died just before the summer. I decided to go paperless, but that lasted about two days into the teaching term. I still prefer my class materials to be paper, and I also print planner pages. So I bought a Brother scanner-copier-laser printer from an outlet. It was a still-sealed returned item, and works perfectly. I have never had a Brother printer, before but I love it and I use it almost every day.  I refuse to use inkjet printers because the cartridges dry out and you then have to replace every colour, even if you want to print in black and white.

I have previously bought a backup hard drive and an air purifier from the same outlet, both at rock-bottom prices. They were unopened returned items, and both worked perfectly.

I was thus surprised when I saw this article from Lund University:

For e-commerce companies, it is cheaper to throw away returned items rather than selling them again. In a new study, researchers at Lund University in Sweden interviewed members of the textile and electronics industries in Europe, hoping to better understand a problem that is snowballing, yet has been the subject of little research.

Internet shopping is increasingly commonplace, and with it comes more returns: previous studies have shown that digital commerce generates significantly more returned products than shopping in shops. According to industry data, the trend of returning items looks to be on the increase, something that might be explained by the fact that shipping returns back is usually free.

High volumes of returns increase fossil-fuel emissions, thanks to more freight journeys. But it gets worse: what is not widely known is that companies – often ones who nurture a sustainable, carbon neutral profile – usually throw away the products that are sent back. 

The total value of returned textile and electronic products destroyed in the EU could be as much as EUR 21.74 billion in 2022, according to some calculations. Some believe the true cost to be higher still.

“The blunt reality is that throwing things away is the lesser of two evils for the company, from a financial perspective. That applies particularly to goods that are cheap compared to the cost of examining, repacking and putting them back on sale again,” says Carl Dalhammar, senior lecturer at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University.

I guess that the cost of processing and restocking is more than the cost of cheaper items. But that adds to landfill and much of it must be things that can be reused. I see that there is a Finnish site called Renow, which resells returned items on behalf of e-commerce partner companies. It’s so sad that we waste so much.

There is a similar site, Ninyes, for clothing. Their motto is ‘resale as a service’

In Sweden, Ninyes expects that 30 to 40 percent of all purchases are returned. Ninyes’ idea is to create a system to make it easier to sell brands’ returned garments, goods that otherwise risk being discarded.

Why can’t brands accept returns in the same way that physical stores do?

– What happens to many fashion brands is that returned products end up in a limbo world. They are not new enough to be sold as new, but they are not used enough to be written off, recycled, resold or discarded. It could be that they are tested, a little more used than the customer said, and that packaging or hangtags have disappeared.

This makes the product an administrative and logistical headache, says Therese Lyander.

– It no longer fits into the system to be returned to retail and e-commerce. Even though it is “like new”. What we wanted to create with the project is an alternative channel for these products. So that they can reach customers who appreciate them via Ninye’s platform.