I've been on Mastodon for several years but I'm just getting into the Fediverse as far as a Reddit alternative. I very much want to move away from big social on all fronts. Elon was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I'm still trying to understand how Kbin and Lemmy work together and/or separately. I created an account on kbin.social and I'm using it for this post. Do I need to also create an account on Lemmy to access all the Lemmy based content? Is there some other good reason to also make a separate Lemmy account?
I think it's time to have a conversation about the massive amount of hidden waste created by the likes of Amazon through free returns.
From TFA:
"In 2022, returns cost retailers about $816 billion in lost sales. That’s nearly as much as the U.S. spent on public schools and almost twice the cost of returns in 2020. The return process, with transportation and packaging, also generated about 24 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions in 2022.
"UPS transports those items to the retailer’s warehouses dedicated to processing returns. This step of the process costs the retailer money – 66% of the cost of a $50 item by one estimate – and emits carbon dioxide as trucks and planes carry items hundreds of miles. The plastic, paper or cardboard from the return package becomes waste.
"In 2019, about 5 billion pounds of waste from returns were sent to landfills, according to an estimate by the return technology platform Optoro. By 2022, the estimated waste had nearly doubled to about 9.5 billion pounds."
For those of us in the metric world, 9.5 billion pounds is around 4.3 billion kilograms.