ACTION PLAYBOOK:
Promote anti-waste policy in your state
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Urge your governor to address the waste from free shipping returns.
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In 15 minutes you will:
Customize and send an email to your governor.
Scale your impact: Ask a friend to do this too!
Report back.
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In the U.S., each state is in charge of managing its own waste policies. This patchwork approach means some states have better anti-waste policies than others – and none have taken on the waste from free returns.
As few as 10 personalized constituent emails (that's you and me!) to an elected official is enough to put a topic on their radar. Let’s urge them to make waste reduction a priority!
➡️ Want more context? Jump to the bottom for a Climate Town episode or a 3-minute explainer.
🗓️ Prefer to do this with friendly faces? RSVP to the next Hour of Action on Zoom or in your city.
1. Send personalized emails to your governor
We know it’s tempting to just sign your name to the bottom of a prewritten email, but personalized emails are much more effective. When they reach elected officials, they’re processed individually, whereas identical, mass-produced letters are batched. Taking a few extra minutes is always worth it. Our Slack #wins-shoutouts channel is packed with celebratory posts from changemakers who sent authentic emails to elected officials and received real, personal responses.
✏️ Use the tool below to send a personalized message to your governor about anti-waste policies.
It’s incredibly important to customize all the [sections in brackets] before hitting send.
2. Instantly 2x (10x? 100x?) your impact
Boom, email SENT! Want to 2x, 10x, 100x your impact? Consider sharing the Climate Town video (below) and this Action Playbook with your network.
Network effects are powerful. Many people you know wonder what they can actually do as an individual to make a difference. Connecting others with specific opportunities for productive climate action is a crucial step toward changing cultural norms, normalizing civic engagement on climate, and making real progress.
You could try…
starting a thread in your Slack/Discord/Reddit community
a post on your preferred social media network
a text to a friend
an email listserv
get creative!
Frame it however you think might be the most effective. Here's a start:
Hey, thought of you while watching this Climate Town video on free returns for online shopping —fascinating and infuriating… and yet somehow still funny!? There’s a 15-minute action to go with it in this Climate Changemakers Action Playbook. I just did it, and tbh, it was oddly satisfying. Have at it, and pass it along to someone else who’d be interested. I’m starting to realize just how many people in our network want to do something but don’t know where to start!
*A few days later…* Get a response? Share it back!
If you receive a response from your governor, please forward the email or send a screenshot to advocacy@climatechangemakers.org. It’s how we measure the collective impact of the Climate Changemakers + Climate Town communities.
👎 Did your governor give a reason it can’t happen? Anything you learn from their response is valuable—including their real or perceived barriers to action—so please report back. We’re trying to grease the wheels for deploying climate solutions: The more we know, the more effective we can become.
👍 Did you get an enthusiastic response? Awesome! Consider sharing it in the Climate Changemakers Slack #wins-shoutouts channel for a virtual clap on the back. You can even share it with friends and family, or on your social media. It’s really exciting when advocacy works, and you never know who you’ll inspire to step up.
And that’s it, playbook complete! Feel accomplished.
Thank you for taking action.
Want more action?
Go to the current Action Plan
Congrats, you just took productive climate action.
Or maybe you haven’t yet, and you just skipped down to this section. In any case, here’s some additional info to learn more about the problem on our hands.
Learn by watching
Our friends at Climate Town create incredible (and very funny) videos about climate change, and we provide specific actions to go with them! The Climate Changemakers Action Playbook you’re reading right now was made specifically for this Climate Town episode. Watch it to learn all about the waste from free shipping returns, then come back here to take action.
Learn by reading
🤨 The Problem: We have a waste crisis in America and free returns are making it worse.
This is just the cliffnotes. For more, watch the ClimateTown video.
When we buy stuff online and then return it, those products rarely find their way to a new happy customer. Instead, returned items are donated, put in big bargain bins for bulk resale, or even – you guessed it – sent to the landfill.
Where does the stuff go? We don’t have much data, since each company has a different system and none of them disclose such information – and let’s be honest, why would they?
Climate Town identifies 5 places our returned merchandise might go:
🔁 Back to the shelves. This outcome is great when it happens, but the standards are very high: most companies, including Amazon, require merchandise to be completely unopened. The moment the plastic wrap seal is broken – even if the item wasn’t used once – it can’t be resold.
🫧 To rehab. About 70% of high-end apparel can be dry-cleaned and sold again. (The cheaper stuff gets sent right to the landfill, no questions asked). Only 30% of returned electronics and home goods can be resold as new.
📦 Donated. This option sounds good, but it’s not always so rosy. Charity shops are sometimes forced to throw away merchandise when their inventory is too full, so the unused items still find their way to the landfill.
🗑️ Straight to Hell the Landfill. Experts guess 10-25% of returned items are sent to the trash – and that percentage is even higher for apparel. Sometimes the merchandise is literally shredded and burned. Yes, lit on fire. They call that “energy recovery.”
🪙 The Liquidation Center. Third-party liquidators buy the items in bulk for pennies on the dollar, and auction them off in bulk, for slightly more pennies on the dollar. New clothes, home goods, and small appliances are commonly fated here because they’re too cheap to return, but still in good shape.
Think for a second about what this means: Retailers are more profitable overall when they dispose of merchandise and give customers a refund anyway than when they resell the item. And this is happening at scale! Nearly 15% of everything Americans purchase gets returned and refunded. That’s billions of dollars of merchandise annually.
A business model where companies still make a profit even after factoring in a 15% refund rate only makes sense in a world of cheap materials and no accountability for overproduction and waste. Think about the way furniture or clothes were made in our grandparent’s generation: quality materials built to last generations. Now, it's particleboard and glue instead of wood and nails; plastic instead of glass; polyester instead of cotton.
America has a massive waste problem that depletes resources, harms the environment, and exacerbates our climate crisis. While no solution is a cure-all, there are straightforward ways that policymakers in every state can reduce waste.
Solution: Introducing the Solid Waste Management Plan
Every state in America is supposed to have a plan for its waste. These are known as “Solid Waste Management Plans” aka a plan for everything we throw away. This is required by the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which also says states are supposed to update these plans every three years to proactively keep their waste management practices up to date with the needs of communities.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency has told states these “requirements” are just a suggestion, leading to a highly variable patchwork of policies that vary state by state. Some states have plans and update them with some regularity (woot!), some states support cities and counties in doing more local planning (not bad!), and some states haven’t touched their plans in decades (oof).
Although implementation of Solid Waste Management Plans is flawed, they’re the primary mechanism by which our states address waste. Therefore, they are a useful and important place for constituents to focus when asking our states to take action on the shocking waste created by free returns.
We can ask our governors to address the waste from free returns in their Solid Waste Management Plans. Technically, we’ll ask the governor to direct the state’s environmental agency staff to address the waste from free returns, since the governor has more leverage over state agencies than our direct outreach would. In doing so, we also elevate the waste crisis as a general topic for our governor.
It’s as simple as sending an email: We know that as few as 10 personalized constituent emails to an elected official are enough to put a topic like this on their radar. The key word here is personalized: Elected officials interpret copy-pasted form letters from constituents as reflecting the agenda of one interest group, and batch the outreach. When we each add the personalized touch to an email – specifically articulating why we care – it’s clear that regular ‘ol constituents took the time of day to write in with sincere concerns. That makes our message and policy ask infinitely more credible and actionable. Our personalized emails can truly influence the waste reduction process.
You’re ready to message your governor! Jump back to the top. ⬆️
To learn more about Solid Waste Management Plans and other smart zero-waste policies, check out Just Zero.