Wasted Trees: the environmental secret of the paperback book industry

The paperback book industry has a dirty, wasteful environmental secret:
thousands of perfectly good books are destroyed every year because they
are overstock.

I learned this first-hand working in the backroom of A Major Retailer
That Shall Remain Nameless. Periodically the company headquarters
would issue recalls for books, and we would have to
round up all the books on the list from the stockroom and the sales
floor. The mass-merchant paperbacks (approximately 4 by 6 inches in
size) had to be processed as follows: tear the front cover off, and
return the front cover to the merchant for credit. The remainder of the
book was to be thrown in the compacter. It could not be donated to
charity or recycled.

These books we had to destroy were in perfect condition, and in fact
many of them never made it out on the shelf from the stockroom.

Books that get this treatment can be identified by looking at the back
cover. By the bar code (UPC) there is a triangle with the letter S
inside it.

I don't really understand the economics of this. If the retailer sent
the whole book back (and the retailer pays the postage), the merchant
could sell it to someone else. The environmental externalities are
apparently not incorporated into the economic model that rationalizes
this practice.

When forced to do this (Forgive me, Mother Earth, for I have sinned!), I
would hum or whistle theme music appropriate for the task at hand: Green
Day's "American Idiot."

Other items we had to throw away included music CDs and computer games.

The waste in the retail industry is appalling.

So, where are you, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, and
other environmental groups? Here is a perfect issue for you to
tackle. Think of the trees you will save.