Borderlands: Texas company aims to help keep returns out of landfills
Borderlands is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week: A Texas company aims to help keep holiday returns out of landfills; a U.S. logistics firm is building a border trade hub in South Texas; a logistics provider snaps up space in the Houston area; and DHL Supply Chain lays off workers in Texas.
Texas company aims to help keep returns out of landfills
A few months ago, one of Heather Hoover-Salomon’s colleagues bought a large piece of furniture online but decided not to keep it.
Hoover-Salomon, CEO of Austin, Texas-based uShip, said she was surprised when the company told her colleague the furniture would probably end up in a landfill rather than on a sales floor or in a warehouse.
“They told my colleague, ‘We’ll come take the furniture back and refund you,’” Hoover-Salomon told FreightWaves. “My colleague asked, ‘What happens with this? Do you guys resell it?’ They’re like, ‘Actually we’re just going to scratch it and it’s going to go to a landfill.’ I was like what?”
Consumers returned more than $816 billion worth of retail merchandise purchased in 2022, according to a report by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. Optoro, a firm specializing in sustainable returns and resales, estimates that returned inventory creates about 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year and the shipping of returns emits 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Hoover-Salomon said she was interested in learning more about returns and how retailers’ bottom lines are affected after the incident with her colleague, as well as after attending a Gartner Inc. symposium earlier this year.
She explained that uShip helps people and businesses haul items through use of its online marketplace that connects shippers with customer-reviewed carriers.
“One of the big buzzwords at the Gartner symposium was returns and it was mind-blowing how big it is in the industry and how we have not solved this problem, especially for items that are in the large and bulky space,” Hoover-Salomon said.
Large and bulky items can be furniture, home goods, appliances and hardware.
The Gartner symposium propelled Hoover-Salomon and uShip to work with WBR Insights to examine how returns affect companies and what could be done to help the issue. Uship recently published its findings in a report titled “Mastering Oversized Returns: Logistics Executives Weigh In On Their Top Challenges.”
Many businesses said they only recover a small percentage of the original sales price of oversized item returns, if any at all, because of the cost of reverse logistics and struggling to book reliable return shipping solution providers.
Based on insights from 100 business leaders that took part in the uShip research report:
Source: freightwaves.com
