While retailers may be leading the public conversation on reverse logistics and sustainability through return policies, recommerce and waste reduction, other industries are building equally sophisticated reverse logistics systems that support their circularity goals.
Reverse logistics is much more than managing retail returns; it’s the backbone of the circular economy across many industries. It drives asset recovery, sustainability and value recapture in sectors as diverse as education, technology, manufacturing and health care.
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Reverse logistics encompasses a broad set of activities, including the collection, processing and redistribution of goods, materials and assets at the end of their useful life or commercial cycle.
For example, across offices and campuses, technology assets are constantly being replaced, upgraded and retired. Each of these transitions requires a reverse logistics process — one that ensures data security, environmental compliance and asset recovery.
Companies like Dell Technologies have developed comprehensive IT asset disposition programs that collect, sanitize, refurbish and redeploy hardware, reducing waste and maximizing reuse. In its FY25 Impact By The Numbers, Dell Technologies noted that 17.4% of its products were made from recycled, renewable or reduced carbon emissions materials, an increase of 3.3% from fiscal year 2024.
Similarly, furniture management and reuse are becoming a major component of corporate sustainability initiatives. Office closures, remodels and relocations generate large quantities of desks, chairs and fixtures that cannot simply be discarded. Reverse logistics networks enable companies to resell, refurbish or donate furniture, reducing landfill waste while supplying refurbished inventory to schools, nonprofits or startups.
Uniforms and textiles are another area where reverse logistics plays an important role. For organizations such as airlines, hospitals and hospitality brands, uniforms serve both a practical necessity and a brand statement. But what happens when uniforms wear out or designs change?
Specialized logistics providers manage the collection, shredding, recycling or repurposing of these garments, ensuring sensitive logos are destroyed while textiles are reused responsibly. This process closes the loop in ways that most consumers never see but that are essential to a company’s environmental, social and governance goals.
Retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers also often face the challenge of unsold or obsolete inventory that still has value but cannot remain in the primary sales channel. Donation logistics allow companies to channel these goods to nonprofits or secondary markets, turning potential waste into social benefit.
Many retailers utilize the secondary retail market as part of their reverse logistics strategies. “Last year, Best Buy supported customers by trading in more than 775,000 devices through its online and in-store store channels,” says Chris Woodbury, Best Buy’s senior director for reverse logistics.
“These trade-ins spanned across a wide range of categories — including cell phones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches, gaming consoles, cameras, and more. These devices are typically resold in secondary markets, bringing a useful second life to products that might otherwise sit idle in someone’s home or end up in a landfill. Best Buy’s Trade-in Program allows customers to trade in their tech for a Best Buy gift card and upgrade to the latest technology, making new devices more accessible and affordable.”
Finally, there’s the category of end-of-use logistics, which focuses on what happens to a product at the end of its lifecycle. This could include recycling components, reclaiming materials or safely disposing of hazardous items. In manufacturing, construction and technology sectors, end-of-use programs are becoming critical not only for sustainability compliance but also for reducing material costs through recovery.
These reverse logistics flows are where circularity meets innovation — where waste becomes resource, and where industries can rethink value creation from the back end of their supply chains.
The Chesapeake region diverted 35 million pounds from landfills in 2024 alone, according to Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake President and CEO Lisa Rusyniak. Goodwill Industries International, which represents the entire Goodwill movement, reported that Goodwill kept 4.4 billion pounds of donated goods in circulation in 2024.
Despite its breadth, reverse logistics is most often associated with retail returns — and with good reason. The rise in ecommerce has fundamentally reshaped consumer behavior and, in turn, the flow of goods. Returns have become a defining feature of the online shopping experience: NRF’s latest returns report suggests that online returns rates are 19.3% for 2025.
NRF and Happy Returns, a UPS company, explored both consumer and retailer perspectives and priorities for the returns experience. View the findings.
Retailers have invested heavily in technology and partnerships to simplify returns management for consumers while keeping costs and environmental impacts under control. Drop-off networks, return lockers and parcel pickup partnerships have proliferated, creating a highly visible consumer-facing layer of reverse logistics.
Yet, while retail returns dominate the headlines, they represent just one slice of a much larger pie. The operational principles that retailers apply, such as visibility, flexibility, automation and sustainability, are now being replicated and adapted across other industries.
The same data-driven optimization that helps a retailer resell a returned coat, for example, now supports an enterprise IT manager tracking refurbished laptops or a facilities team managing reclaimed building materials.
The ultimate goal of circularity is to design processes where materials and products remain in use for as long as possible. Reverse logistics provides the infrastructure and intelligence to make that vision operational. It connects the dots between use and reuse, between ownership and stewardship.
In retail, circularity often manifests as resale, refurbishment or recycling programs — initiatives like Patagonia’s Worn Wear, IKEA’s Buy Back & Resell or Best Buy’s electronics recycling program.
In other sectors, circularity takes on different forms. For manufacturers, it may involve closed-loop supply chains that reclaim metals or plastics from end-of-life products. For technology providers, it’s about reusing components or extending device life through repair programs. For institutions and government agencies, it can mean ensuring responsible disposal or donation of outdated assets.
Each case relies on the same logistical foundation: reverse movement, intelligent sorting and efficient reintegration into value streams.
Moreover, circularity creates new business opportunities. Logistics companies that once focused solely on forward movement are now building specialized reverse capabilities such as repair hubs, recycling networks and recommerce marketplaces.
Data analytics and automation are becoming essential tools for tracking products through multiple life cycles. Sustainability reporting, too, increasingly depends on the transparency that reverse logistics systems provide. As expectations grow, organizations must demonstrate not just how they source responsibly but also how they recover and reuse.
As circularity becomes a business imperative, reverse logistics will continue to evolve into a strategic differentiator.
Retail will remain a key catalyst for innovation, particularly as consumer behavior continues to drive change. But the future of reverse logistics lies in its ability to serve multiple industries and circular use cases.
