[byandyphillips]

I don't think this is a good argument that just because x industry does this that it's ok another y industry does it to justify it.

[andrewstuart2]

It's important to have the article properly framed, though. If you didn't organize and get rid of (sell or toss) unused things at your place, you're eventually going to end up under piles of garbage nobody wants unless you somehow anticipated all your own needs perfectly.

At some point you buy something you thought you'd need that you didn't. The same goes with businesses trying to sell. The difference from cleaning up your software project is that getting rid of physical product is not just deleting a few lines of code. It has to go somewhere.

[SiempreViernes]

There exists a second hand market online, Amazon just don't want to feed into it.

Probably the scarcity by waste leads to more profits than trying to recycle, as the environmental costs of waste aren't paid by Amazon.

[outside1234]

I don't think he is making that argument -- which is why he prefaced it with "This is not ideal" -- just setting context,

[trynumber9]

Is it a different industry? Any customer-focused retail that readily accepts returns will inevitably have returned items that are difficult to resell.

[jliptzin]

And in that situation the retailer is just throwing away the product for the consumer who returned it; otherwise the consumer would probably have just thrown it away.