A business phenomena / practice of disposing unsold new product before even usage starts has gained attention lately. Clothing giants like H&M and Burberry have been burning new clothes. Burberry though, promised to abandon this practice. Similarly, Amazon (in Germany) has found to destroy returned unused goods. This unsustainable practice seems to be rather widely used. Is there any academic literature, including interesting empirics, case studies, theorising that has been done to research this phenomena?
Interesting question Jouni!
I am not aware of any literature (and a quick search with terms like 'stock destruction' did also not yield many results). Maybe in the field of 'circular fashion' people have written about it. A student of mine is doing a thesis on cicrular fashion initiatives in The Netherlands and uses this report a lot: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications/a-new-textiles-economy-redesigning-fashions-future
also, we now have a circular fashion lab at our university and the founder (Kim Poldner) may have more insights on this phenomenon of stock destruction: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/circular-fashion-2.htm
Thank you Laurens, I checked Ellen Macarthur report but it doesn't actually talk about the issue. I sent a message to Kim as well.
The important phenomenon to which this query refers can be approached from the angle of "reverse logistics", which is the process of moving unsold (or defective) goods from their typical final destination—back up the supply chain—for the purpose of capturing value, repairing, recycling, or proper disposal. In literature, an early use of the term was in "Reverse Logistics: White Paper", (Stock, 1992) published by the Council of Logistics Management. The number of publications on the topic has since increased significantly, as a search on Google Scholar demonstrates. (Of course, concern for sustainability are, ever more, associated with reverse logistics.)
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