This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want

When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.

Michael is one of dozens of material handlers—the official job title—at the Inmar Intelligence returns-processing center in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania. Inmar is a returns liquidator, which means that popular clothing brands and all kinds of other retailers contract with the company to figure out what to do with the stuff that customers end up not wanting. Much of that process involves complex machinery and data analysis, but the more than 40 million returned products that the facility sifts through annually still must pass in front of human eyes. Material handlers are charged with determining a return’s ultimate fate—whether it goes back to the retailer to be sold anew, gets destroyed, or something in between.

I wandered by Michael’s workstation on a trip out to Breinigsville last month to see one of the great mysteries of American consumer life in action: what actually happens to your unwanted purchases when you send them back. Michael, who was on the clock and would only share his first name, had just begun evaluating a pink button-down, plucked from a box of identical shirts. In the space of barely more than a minute, he confirmed the item number on the fabric label, unbuttoned the shirt, gave it the same kind of smell test you’d perform on your dirty jeans to see if they have one more grocery-store run in them, turned the shirt fully inside out and back again, eyed it for stains or other imperfections, ripped the price off the paper tag, rebuttoned it, lint-rolled it, folded it to the precise dimensions of a new clear plastic bag, and deposited the shirt inside. A brand’s contract with Inmar can stipulate details down to exactly how many pieces of tape are used to seal a perfect (or very close to it) item into new packaging. The pink shirt, an overstocked design destined for a discount store, got two.

Reverse logistics—basically, the business of moving unwanted products back up the supply chains from whence they came, or into different supply chains entirely—is a ballooning global industry that was valued at nearly $1 trillion in 2022. Before the advent of online shopping, return rates for even finicky products like clothing were in the single digits; now 20 to 30 percent of all purchases come back. Beyond the behemoths—Amazon, Walmart—very few retailers undertake the messy, fiddly work of evaluating the deluge of products themselves. Instead, the prepaid shipping labels you print out guide most of your returns to third-party facilities like Inmar, where they’re stacked six feet tall in palletized bins known as gaylords, along with thousands of other retaped cardboard boxes and poly mailers, all waiting to be ripped open, eyeballed, and searched by hand.

When I arrived at Inmar’s facility, on a sunny morning shortly before Thanksgiving, I did so alongside a fleet of trucks pulling in to pick up or drop off loads of UPS packages or ShopRite groceries or Coca-Cola products at a sea of other surrounding warehouses. Breinigsville is the kind of place where logistics facilities tend to crop up. Just outside Allentown, it’s in an area with plenty of open, inexpensive land, which has allowed for the construction of wide, low-slung warehouses near highways for moving tractor trailers full of consumer goods between there and Philadelphia or New York City in a couple of hours. ProLogis, the industrial real-estate company that operates this sprawling campus, boasts to potential tenants that it is situated within a day’s drive of nearly a third of American consumers. The scene was industry for postindustrial America. No smokestacks rose into the sky; the grounds were neatly manicured; the buildings were uniform shades of white and pale gray. The Bridgestone facility on campus doesn’t make tires. It moves them around.

Inmar stakes its claim as the largest returns liquidator in North America. The company says that it processes half a billion returned goods a year across 17 facilities. At the Breinigsville facility alone, Inmar’s material handlers process more than 100,000 consumer goods each day on behalf of all kinds of retailers—e-commerce giants, big-box discounters, drugstore chains, clothing brands, purveyors of home decor. Inside, the first thing to greet me on the processing floor was an enormous cardboard baler, fed by a conveyor belt running high above the ground. Cardboard, just as much as returned products themselves, is an inescapable material reality of Inmar’s business; at times, it looked as if almost everything was cosseted by layers of repurposed cardboard or industrial-grade cling wrap. Beyond the conveyor belt, I found towers of pallets stacked to the ceiling as far as I could see, each box stuffed with throw pillows or defective toasters or skinny jeans that are no longer cool. Some were new arrivals awaiting final judgment; others had already been sorted and were waiting for their truck to come in.

I spent a little more than three hours in the facility. Some of that time was in a room with Inmar executives, dutifully scribbling notes as they answered my questions and expounded on the industry. For most of my visit, though, I simply meandered around the warehouse with them in tow, peeking around every corner, prodding at piles of returns, and watching staffers work. The facility was in the middle of a sleepy second shift. Occasionally a forklift would dart in or out of the aisles of pallet towers, depositing another load ready for transport or fetching a fresh set of home decor or sporting goods for inspection. Product examinations happened in a series of distinct work areas, each nestled in a clearing that I would encounter occasionally in the shelving forest. The zones dealt with different types of returns. Rugs had their own area. So did clothing and shoes. Near the baler, I watched employees sort through the fleece blankets and sets of fake eyelashes that had been sent in from a large chain pharmacy. All the way in the back, special care was taken to separate out the different brands of small appliances sold by a major discount department store.

I’m not identifying the pharmacy or department store, or any of the dozens of other brand names that I saw floating through the facility, because I had to agree to that up front to be allowed inside. All of Inmar’s clients have confidentiality agreements in their contracts that prevent Inmar from publicly naming the companies it serves. Retailers have a fraught relationship with reverse logistics. They rarely acknowledge the system in public. Consumerism has always required a certain amount of abstraction. Originally, this was accomplished through the invention of the department store and the advertising industry, which goaded shoppers into associating new dresses with the limitless possibilities of the self, not with the exploitation and grime of garment factories. As consumer industries have changed, that abstraction has gained new layers: overseas production, online shopping, free shipping and returns. When you order something on Amazon, it’s not so much an act of buying a specific thing, or even of buying an idea of yourself. Instead, you’re buying an idea of a product, and one in every three or four of those ideas doesn’t pan out.

Reverse logistics is, in some sense, the process of unwinding those abstractions—of turning ideas and possibilities back into physical goods that must be dealt with. Figuring out what to do with the stuff that people rejected is unglamorous work, but retailers know how necessary it is. They also tend to be terrible at handling all of it themselves. It’s difficult to process returns profitably without the benefit of enormous scale and the data-analysis capabilities that create it, not to mention a lot of regular people in exurban America making sure you didn’t accidentally include your underpants when you sent back that pair of jeans—the most common stowaways that Inmar’s material handlers find in returned clothing. (They also come across errant vape pens and the occasional wedding ring in garments’ pockets.) Returns “are not what the companies want to do, or what they built themselves to do,” Thomas Borders, Inmar’s vice president of product-life-cycle solutions, told me. “They were built to sell.”

Inside the facility, stripped of context and pretense and marketing, the goods I encountered seemed a lot more similar than they do when gleaming and new on a store shelf. Luxury area rugs probably won’t meet the same fate as the stuffed animals sold at chain pharmacies, but their futures are governed by the same unsentimental practicality. What actually happens to them hinges on a bunch of different factors: whether they were returned by a buyer or by the retailer itself, whether they’re still in their original packaging, whether they show signs of use, whether they’ve been reported by the buyer as damaged or defective, whether they’re high- or low-margin products, whether their original manufacturer is willing to take them back from the retailer, whether they bear a desirable brand name.

Where a product was purchased can play a major role too. Of the brands that Inmar processes, those that sell their own products directly to the general public put more than 90 percent of their returns back into their inventory on average, according to Inmar. Meanwhile, retailers that sell a bunch of different brands do so with less than half of their returns, according to Inmar’s data, largely because the logistics of multibrand retail are more complex and the brands carried by these stores tend to be less desirable. In the best-case scenario, what can’t be sold again by its original retailer will be liquidated to wholesale buyers, eventually stocking discount stores or resale platforms domestically or small retailers in poorer countries. The stuff that doesn’t find a buyer will be donated, recycled, or destroyed. (Destroyed is the preferred industry euphemism for products that end up landfilled, incinerated, or otherwise trashed.)

Inmar says that its donations go to a whole range of charities—food banks, shelters, animal-rescue organizations. But just like donations and recycling that come from individual households, there’s no guarantee that any particular product will find a willing recipient, or that it can be effectively remade into a safe, useful new material. Lots of things that aren’t immediately deposited in landfills still end up in them, even if they pass through the hands of multiple middlemen first.

In the Breinigsville facility’s garment-inspection sector, where Michael was sorting pink shirts, the work of determining any particular product’s destination is more complicated because the potential outcomes for clothing are more numerous. Many different types of wholesalers and discounters are willing to buy up liquidated clothing, and brands can be very picky about where goods bearing their name are allowed to show up. Inspections take place at a bank of about two dozen identical, brightly lit workstations where employees attempt to discern how honest you were when you filled out your return slip—or, in the highly likely event that you declined to fill it out at all, what that return slip should have said. The centerpiece of each station is a white tabletop, above which is mounted a computer monitor that will explain the precise level and type of scrutiny that different items from different retailers require. Employees are armed with an arsenal of very analog tools—lint rollers, box cutters, sanitizing wipes, an array of plastic bags. Behind each station, five colorful, waist-high bins represent the possible futures of each garment: liquidation, donation, recycling, destruction, or, if everything is perfect, a speedy trip back to the retailer’s main inventory.

Inmar collects huge tranches of data on what gets returned and why, which can be incredibly valuable to retailers desperate to cut down on their return rates or catch faulty products before they irritate even more customers. But really, information about customer returns can only do so much for retailers’ bottom line. Most of the returns that Inmar handles actually aren’t things that anyone bought and rejected, or that anyone bought at all. Instead, they are excess inventory—a surplus of goods that comes directly from retailers themselves. Their hope is to squeeze at least some value out of everything their customers didn’t want by selling it off or returning it to the wholesaler or manufacturer from which they bought it.

Consumer behavior isn’t cleanly predictable. Sometimes trend projections fall flat or the weather behaves in strange ways or sizing doesn’t work out as planned, and the velvet skirts or patio furniture or redesigned hiking boots just don’t move. Or, worse, they do move, but then they all come back. The system as currently constituted requires the circulation of much more stuff than will ultimately find useful purpose in people’s homes; the shelves must always be full, the sizes and colors must all be available, and there has to be surplus to satisfy consumerism’s promise of convenience and abundance. If your retailer doesn’t provide this—the excess that the industry itself taught people to expect—then your competitors will.

All of this—the high return rates, the extra stock, the endless shipping, and the enormous numbers of workers sniffing and buttoning their way through careful decisions—doesn’t come cheap. That expense drives up the prices of consumer goods for everyone, no matter what your personal shopping and returns habits are. Lately, retailers have started to take more pointed measures to try to close Pandora’s cardboard shipping box. Most notably, many have started to charge for return shipping, rolling back the free, open-ended policies that persuaded so many people to adopt online shopping in the first place. But these changes aren’t designed to dissuade people from shopping online; they’re simply asking shoppers to start subsidizing the process. So far, the tactic seems to be working. At the end of my visit, I sat down with Borders, the Inmar VP, in the Inmar facility’s lone conference room, readjusting to the scale of a space meant for humans after a couple of hours in those meant for industry. He told me that retailers’ new policies have so far not affected the volume of returns that Inmar processes at all.