Sustainability promise: Greenwashing for Zalando returns | tagesschau.de

Europe’s largest fashion online retailer Zalando promises a sustainable handling of returns. But the company deceives customers, like one SWR-Research with the “Zeit” and the research platform Flip shows.

Zalando is the largest online fashion retailer in Europe. According to the company, it booked more than 250 million orders in 2021 alone. About half of that was returned. Zalando advertises becoming a sustainable fashion platform with a “net positive impact on people and planet” and making returns and delivery carbon neutral.

On its website, Zalando states that 97 percent of the returned items of clothing are “sold again via the Zalando shop after appropriate testing and careful processing”. The rest is sold in Zalando outlets or in the Zalando Lounge and donated to organizations. Less than 0.05 percent of returns are destroyed “in exceptional cases”, for example in the case of pollution or pest infestation. Does Zalando keep this promise? This question is the team of SWR-investigative format VOLLBILD in a long-term research.

In August 2022, VOLLBILD reporters ordered ten pieces of clothing, had GPS and Bluetooth trackers sewn into them and then sent them back to Zalando. They followed the routes of the trackers for months and found out that some of the returns cover very long distances all over Europe.

Returns are sorted in Poland

The first tracker signals took them to Gardno in Poland. There is one of the logistics centers where Zalando returns packages from Germany arrive to be sorted. According to local workers, goods that smell of perfume or smoke or have been visibly worn are also “disposed of” there. One worker even reported that she was there when these goods were shredded. Zalando denies that clothes with a perfume smell are disposed of.

Another tracker led to an address in Darmstadt where an import-export trade is also registered. When asked, the retailer said that he did not deal in Zalando goods. Nevertheless, the tracker sent signals from this address for months. So are Zalando returns resold to secondary marketers? There is no mention of this on the homepage.

Resale to wholesalers

“We are the dumping ground for people who don’t know what to do with their returns anymore,” Mohammad Marmar, a returns wholesaler from Senden near Munster, told the reporters. He has often bought returned goods from Zalando and sold them abroad. The only condition he gets from companies like Zalando: the goods must disappear from the core market of Europe. That’s why he sells the goods mainly to Asia and Africa, said the returns wholesaler. Zalando no longer controls what happens to the goods abroad, whether they are resold or end up in landfills. Zalando did not comment on this when asked.

When the reporters confronted the company with their research results, Zalando admitted that they also resell returns to wholesale partners: “In addition, we use the opportunity to sell leftover stocks to (…) wholesale partners in order to avoid the destruction of goods if they are in their original form can still be used.” However, Zalando does not mention the sale of its goods to wholesalers on the homepage and is thus hiding important information for its customers.

The research also shows that Zalando’s promise to sell “97 percent of these returned fashion items” again through the Zalando shop is misleading customers. When asked, Zalando admitted that the promised 97 percent does not apply to all items on its platform. Of the more than 1,600 brands and retailers that are part of the Zalando partner program, only half currently process returns through Zalando. The promise does not apply to the other half. This information is also not found on the Zalando homepage. The impression is given here that the 97 percent apply to all items ordered via Zalando.

The tracker research reveals something else: half a year after they were returned, the tracked items of clothing have made an odyssey through the whole of Europe. A returned baby romper covered almost 7,000 kilometers before the tracker’s battery ran out in Sweden. A tracked green vest was also almost 7000 kilometers on the way and landed in Spain. Other signals came from Slovakia, Belgium, Italy and Poland. In total, the ten items of clothing returned by the VOLLBILD reporters traveled almost 29,000 kilometers. After several months, most items, including the items of clothing that were tracked, are sold out in the Zalando shop. Many are unlikely to ever reach a customer.

Trucks as storage rooms

Returns researcher Björn Asdecker from the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg evaluated the routes of the tracked returns. His explanation for the zigzag routes: Zalando works with artificial intelligence, so-called “predictive analytics”, which calculates where the clothes will probably be ordered next. To ensure that the clothing reaches the customer quickly, it is transported across the sales markets in trucks. “Ultimately, the trucks serve as storage space for Zalando,” says Asdecker. Zalando confirmed on request, it happens “that a returned item travels comparatively longer distances in order to enable resale and thus further use.”

In its annual report, Zalando writes that the return is climate-neutral, for example through CO2 compensation. However, the paths of the tracked garments reveal the true environmental impact of Zalando returns. “There really shouldn’t be anything like that if you’re committed to sustainability in the same breath,” says Björn Asdecker.

The film on the subject is available at www.youtube.de/vollbild and in the ARD media library.