Among the most eye-opening details in this article, about one-fifth of the value of U.S. online orders are returned every year. That is an enormous amount of waste — potential and realized.

The problem is that the main incentive for pursuing corporate sustainability work is its ability to create more marketable products. Outside of sustainability efforts that are pursued based on compliance or regulation, much of this work is built around the idea of pandering to consumers' understanding of sustainability, something that’s notoriously variable.