What: Amazon is handling a rapidly growing number of returns that are causing a massive problem for the e-commerce giant and the planet.

Why it is important: An NRF survey revealed that a record USD 761 billion of merchandise was returned to retailers in 2021.

U.S. returns generate 16 million metric tons of carbon emissions during their complicated reverse journey and up to 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year, according to returns solution provider Optoro. In the case of reverse logistics, most of the merchandise cannot be resold as it was originally, leading to massive amounts of waste.

Amazon shared that it does not send items to landfills, but rather relied on energy recovery, which means they burn the items to produce heat which will then be used to produce energy.

Amazon offers easy returns to customers, but now they are left with the problem of what to do with these goods on the back end. The boom of second-hand markets has helped provide new options for returned items with Amazon dedicating specific spaces to articles that have been used, refurbished, or that were overstock.

How Amazon plans to fix its massive returns problem