Every return has a footprint. The box goes back, often on a truck or a plane, sometimes to a landfill rather than back onto a shelf, and that footprint is bigger than most brands realize.

Up to 24 million metric tons of CO2 emissions can be attributed to e-commerce returns industry-wide each year, according to an Optoro study. Returns now account for an estimated 25% of total e-commerce emissions. And it's not just carbon: companies sent more than 9.5 billion pounds of returned products straight to landfill in 2022 alone, per CleanHub's analysis, product that was manufactured, shipped once, shipped back, and then simply discarded. Online shopping as a category also generates roughly 4.8 times more packaging waste than shopping in a physical store.

None of that is because returns themselves are bad, customers returning a product that genuinely doesn't fit is a normal, healthy part of e-commerce. The waste comes from returns that didn't need to happen in the first place, and from what brands do with an item once it comes back.

Where the environmental cost actually comes from

Unnecessary returns. A large share of returns, sizing issues, a color that looked different online, a product that didn't match expectations, are preventable with better information at the point of purchase, not an inevitable cost of selling online.

Transportation, twice. Every returned item has already traveled once outbound and now travels again inbound, often by the fastest and least carbon-efficient method available, since return shipping is rarely optimized the way outbound shipping is.

What happens after the return. Returned items that aren't resold, because grading, restocking, or repackaging is too slow or too costly, too often end up landfilled or destroyed rather than put back into inventory.

What brands can do about it

Give customers the information to get it right the first time. Detailed sizing charts, accurate color representation, real customer photos and reviews, all of it reduces the preventable share of returns before a single box ships back.

Be transparent about the cost of returns, not just the policy. If you're not offering free returns, say why. The Swedish brand Rodebjer puts it plainly in its own policy: "Processing returns has an environmental impact and... a fee... will be added." Customers respond better to an honest reason than to a policy that just feels restrictive.

Make in-store returns and exchanges easy, where you have stores. A customer who exchanges in person skips a second shipping leg entirely, and often leaves with a different product on the spot instead of waiting for a refund and reordering.

Use return management software to actually act on the data. A digital return process is what makes the rest of this possible at all — it's how you see which products drive returns, route items back into inventory instead of a landfill, and cut the pre-printed, one-size-fits-all label that gets used whether the return needed express shipping or not.

The piece that's changed: preventing the return, not just managing it

Everything above reduces the cost of a return after a customer has decided to send something back. The bigger environmental lever is upstream of that: not shipping the item that was always going to come back in the first place.

This is where agentic AI changes the shape of the problem rather than just the cost of handling it. An agent that has access to a customer's past purchase and return history can flag a likely-wrong-fit order before it ships, or recommend the right size in the same conversation a customer is already having about a previous return, turning a transaction that would have generated two shipments and a landfill-bound box into one.

None of that works without the return data a digital system has been collecting all along; it's the same data this article has always pointed to, just put to a more active use.

We're building yayloh.ai to work that way, not as a separate sustainability feature, but because preventing an unnecessary return is a better outcome than processing it well. The two goals, cutting support costs and cutting waste, turn out to point in the same direction.

The bottom line

Returns aren't going away, and a healthy return rate is a sign customers trust you enough to try. What's worth fixing is the share of returns that were avoidable, and what happens to the product once it comes back. Get the information right at checkout, be transparent about cost, and get the item back into inventory instead of a landfill, and the environmental story becomes less about cleaning up after a return and more about never generating the unnecessary ones at all.