After the rush of holiday shopping comes the flood of holiday returns. In this past weekend’s Consumed column in the NY Times Magazine Rob Walker discussed the attempts made by many companies to turn their returns into profits. Clothing, cosmetics and electronics retailers are focusing more of their attention on how to keep their used products, often in nearly new (or atleast workable) condition, out of landfills and circulating in the market.
Electronics producers in particular, conscious of the growing impact of e-waste on the environment, are coming up with new ways to recycle their goods - which are at the highest risk of becoming quickly outdated and discarded. Companies like Hewlett-Packard are outsourcing the recycling of their returns to third parties - like Genco in Pittsburgh who’ve made a business out of both selling to salvage buyers as well as using sites like eBay to reach consumers interested in buying second-hand products or parts at heavy discount. As Walker reports:
Retail Surplus, one of [Genco's] storefronts on eBay, for example, recently offered a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet D2430 printer, described as “an open-box return that ‘looks new,’ ” meaning the packaging “may be worn and retaped” but “the item should function properly.” (It sold for $14.49.) Another one of Genco’s eBay storefronts, Chance Deals, features even lower prices — and a blunt caveat emptor. (Greve says with a laugh that the only thing guaranteed about, say, a DVD player sold through Chance Deals is that at some point it really was a DVD player — though he also notes that Chance Deals has a positive feedback rating of 95 percent.) In all, Greve says, Genco liquidates about $3.5 million worth of merchandise a day.
Hewlett-Packard is one company that explicitly treats “reuse” situations as part of its efforts to be a good corporate citizen by reducing e-waste… Still, it would be an overstatement to say that even such improved efforts have halted, much less reversed, that problem: Greenpeace, in its most recent assessment of various electronic manufacturers’ performance, notes that electronic-product life cycles have accelerated drastically in recent years, making such goods more “perishable” than ever.
