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Amazon Slammed for Destroying As-New and Returned Goods (fortune.com)
Amazon is destroying "massive amounts" of as-new and returned items, raising the ire of the German government and environmental campaigners, local media reported. Fortune: The types of items being destroyed here go way beyond the "health and personal care" products that Amazon has long been destroying when people return them, for sanitary reasons. We're talking things like washing machines, smartphones and furniture. The revelation drew an angry response from the German government and environmental campaigners. "This is a huge scandal," Jochen Flasbarth from the German environment ministry told WirtschaftsWoche. "We are consuming these resources despite all the problems in the world. This approach is not in step with our times." Greenpeace's Kirsten Brodde said there was a need for a new "law on banning the waste and destruction of first-hand and usable goods."
This.
I spent a summer working in Office Depot's Returns Consolidation Center in Auburn, WA. We accepted returns from pretty much every Office Depot west of the Mississippi River. And Chicago. At times, I'd receive bubble wrap, or pallet wrap, or boxes...I could use all of these, especially the boxes for repack...but no. They have to get destroyed. They were brand new, unopened (or still folded, for the boxes) and immediately useful to us. But bureaucratic paperwork says it needs to be destroyed, so out the went.
The amount of HP ink cartridges I received still baffles me. And whoever packed those water coolers for return that still had water in them, may your ancestors forever be cursed to torment in hell!