In Consumed: Starting Over

Returned Goods: How unwanted product flows back into the consumer ecosystem.

This week’s Consumed column in The New York Times Magazine is about how “reverse logistics” processes are changing, to deal more efficiently with the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods consumers return every year — ranging from the defective to the perfectly-good-but unwanted.

Electronics makers are trying to get better at evaluating the “perishable” products that we send back to them to sort the useless from the potentially re-sellable. Some spin this as e-waste-reducing “social responsibility,” but there’s another factor as well: “There’s a huge market” for returned electronics,” one professor says. And indeed, one firm specializing in such re-selling liquidates $3.5 million worth of merchandise every day.

Read the column here.