PETALING JAYA: Easy return and refund policies may give online shoppers peace of mind, but the convenience comes with a hidden environmental cost, including extra deliveries, packaging waste and discarded goods.
Pelindung Khazanah Alam Malaysia (Peka) president Rajesh Nagarajan said a returned purchase effectively creates a second logistics cycle, involving another round of collection, transportation, sorting and inspection.
“A return is not a transaction reversing itself. It is a second logistics cycle superimposed on the first.”
Rajesh said while the environmental impact varied depending on factors such as transport distance, packaging and how the returned item was handled, every additional journey consumes energy and generates emissions.
He said the bigger concern was the embedded environmental cost of products that were manufactured, transported and potentially never used.
“The greater waste is rarely the fuel burnt by the return courier; it is the manufacture of a product that was never genuinely required and may never be used at all,” Rajesh said.
He added that returned goods could be discounted, liquidated, donated, recycled or discarded depending on their condition, packaging, seasonality and the cost of inspection.
“Products that cannot be resold represent a significant environmental loss even if they do not end up in landfills.”
He said existing legislation provided some mechanisms to address waste, including Section 102 of the Solid Waste and Public Cleansing Management Act 2007, which allows for extended producer responsibility through take-back and deposit-refund systems.
“Authorities should consider applying such principles more broadly to e-commerce returns, while ensuring platforms remain accountable for the waste generated by their operations.
“Moreover, platforms should disclose, as a matter of course, what happens to returned goods: whether an item is restocked, resold, liquidated, donated, recycled or destroyed.”
Rajesh also called for platforms to publish return-rate and disposal data, saying consumers should be given more information about the environmental consequences of their purchases.
“Consumers should recognise that ‘free returns’ describes who bears the financial cost, not whether a cost exists,” he said.
However, Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) president Mohideen Abdul Kader said return policies remained important for consumer protection, particularly when goods were defective or did not match their advertised descriptions.
He said consumers previously faced difficulties returning defective products, with sellers sometimes disputing whether the goods were genuinely faulty.
With easier refund policies, he said consumers could return unused items instead of throwing them away, potentially keeping them out of landfills.
At the same time, Mohideen urged consumers to avoid making unnecessary purchases simply because returning items was easy.
“Consumers must also exercise caution and avoid an unbridled urge to purchase goods online,” he said.
Rajesh said the solution was not to restrict legitimate consumer return rights but to make the system more transparent and environmentally responsible.
“E-commerce platforms should move towards a pollution-prevention and circular-economy model rather than simply becoming more efficient at processing increasing volumes of returns,” he said.
