Value your time. Trash belongs in landfills.

With a lot of Amazon returns, it’s a pointless waste of time to send the thing back to Amazon and you should throw it away instead.

For a $20 item you might spend an hour when you factor in the whole return process (trip to the UPS store or Whole Foods, parking, waiting in line) plus the added hassle etc… You just spent an hour of your time and some of your mental energy for $20. That’s time you could have spent with your family or doing something cool, or anything else worth way more than $20 to you.

If I offered you $20 to work for an hour flipping burgers instead of doing whatever else you wanted to do today, would you accept that? Most people reading this would say no. But then they’d spend part of their afternoon shlepping a spatula they don’t want around town for a $14 refund.

“But Tom what about more expensive items/shorter trips/trips I was going to do anyway/I could donate it etc.?”

Only Sith deal in absolutes. This doesn’t apply to everything. But do the math and figure out what hourly rate you’d accept to do the return. For any item that’s a bad deal, throw it away. Donations aren’t much better. You waste your time AND the person who buys the donated item only saves a few bucks which might be a bad use of their time too. If you want to donate, give someone in need some money.

“But environment/waste etc.”

Currently the best place for all waste (even recycling) is a landfill. Our recycling technology continually improves and we’ll be much better at recycling in the future. It would be better for what you call “the environment” to recycle your item 50 years from now because we’ll be able to re-use its components much more efficiently. In the meantime, we should store it temporarily in a landfill.

Plus if you did the math you’d see that we will never run out of landfill space for practical purposes. Wall-E is a children’s movie with a fictional premise. If we dedicated 1% of our land to landfills it would take 5000 years to fill them, during which time I think it’s reasonable to assume we’d learn how to recycle better, or dig deeper, or shoot trash into the sun or whatever.

In summary: Value your time. Trash belongs in landfills.