We’ve all returned something. It seems harmless enough. A product that doesn’t fit certainly doesn’t do you any good sitting in your closet, not to mention the money lost on an item you’ll never wear. But many store returns don’t wind up back on the shelf and could be doing more damage than you think.

I’ve done it a number of times—in a rush, or not wanting to use the dressing room (those slimming mirrors are totally lame)—I bought items knowing that what I didn’t like at home I’d just return.

Simple, right? Apparently not. “[B]illions of dollars’ worth of items get returned to stores every year, and not all of them are fit to go back on the shelf,” reports Consumerist.

A recent study published in The Retail Equation found store returns cost retailers $270 billion in 2013. And when it comes to the holidays, “nearly one in three gift recipients would return at least one item, and holiday returns during that time accounted for nearly $60 billion in lost sales,” reports Racked.

While returning “sellable” items is one thing—the 5 identical unopened “Frozen” dolls your daughter got for Christmas or a never-worn pair of shoes, for example—many big box stores have shockingly lenient return policies on open and used unsellable items as well. “Sephora will happily reclaim open mascara bottles and perfume for a full refund, and Nordstrom’s we’ll-take-anything-back policy is practically legendary,” Racked notes.

And this is a problem. A really, really big one. Again, Racked:

Back in 1991, the LA Times reported on a 6,000-square-foot Nordstrom warehouse in Anaheim, California that was solely dedicated to figuring out what to do with returned merchandise. In the early ’90s, the company got in hot water with the state of Oregon over allegedly selling lipstick, shoes, and other used merchandise as new in its Oregon stores. Nordstrom ended up paying a $25,000 settlement to the state, although it admitted no wrongdoing.

Target, which also has a fairly lenient return policy, says it donates or sells to liquidators or even recycles some of its unsellable store returns. Goodwill, which acquires most of its items through donations, does purchase some returned items or surplus inventory from large stores like Target. But it’s not making a dent in that $270 billion number.

Similar to the problem of routing near-expired or damaged food items to shelters or soup kitchens, most of the store returns never make it to these other destinations, particularly when they’re used or slightly damaged. “If [the returns are] slightly not perfect and you don’t have a process for it, it’s more of a hassle than it’s worth,” Brandon Levey, CEO and co-founder of Stitch Labs, a company that helps with inventory management told Racked. “So you end up just throwing them into a box and saying, ‘I’ll get to it later, I’ll get to it after the new year.'” And in many cases that means a landfill is in its not-too-distant future.

All this matters—a lot, actually—if we give a shit about the planet. While returning something might seem like a better choice than trashing it, the real challenge is in getting better at purchasing items we aren’t going to return in the first place and making better, more thoughtful purchasing decisions instead of impulse buys. It means trying on clothes in cold dressing rooms with crappy lighting and deceptive mirrors, checking expiration dates—and seriously, people, if you open the mascara, use it.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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