Retailers don’t need big financial incentives to get consumers to return used clothing—but they do need the right message.
A new peer-reviewed study in the INFORMS journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management finds that simply telling consumers their returned items will be “kept out of landfills” significantly increases participation in take-back programs. But when retailers disclose that they may resell those items for profit, participation plummets.
The study, “The Role of Information, Rewards, and Convenience in Take-Back Programs for Clothing,” was authored by Erin C. McKie of The Ohio State University, Anna Sáez de Tejada Cuenca of IESE Business School in Barcelona and Vishal Agrawal of Georgetown University.
Low Participation for Clothing Take-Back Programs
Take-back programs offer consumers a way to return used items such as clothing instead of throwing them away. Many companies and retailers offer these programs as part of their business model or to support their environmental stewardship and sustainability commitments, according to the study. Regardless of the motivation, a persistent challenge remains: low consumer participation. This lack of participation is a major concern as it limits the programs’ effectiveness and long-term viability.
“One of the traditional mechanisms through which retailers incentivize consumers to participate in take-back programs is through monetary rewards,” McKie said in a news release. “However, our discussions with organizations in the retail industry and surveys of more than 100 clothing take-back programs revealed that providing rewards alone to induce consumer participation can be cost prohibitive. Motivated by this problem, we set out to study whether two other levers — information and convenience of the return process — can also influence consumer participation.”
To test these research questions, the researchers conducted four experiments involving more than 5,200 participants, according to the study. The experiments measured the financial reward consumers required under different levels of information and convenience.
“We found that providing generic environmental information, that is, simply noting that collected items will be diverted from the landfill, significantly lowered the reward required for participation,” Sáez de Tejada said in the release. “By contrast, mentioning that the retailer may resell the returned product and make a profit actually reduced participation. Our results show there is a consumer aversion toward companies visibly profiting from sustainability programs. Consumers demanded higher compensation when they learned that retailers would resell collected items.”
Convenience Pays Off
The study also found that greater convenience such as offering at-home pickup or easy mail-in options further reduced the amount of the reward required from consumers.
“Even though convenient options may cost retailers more, those costs may be offset by the lower rewards consumers expect,” Agrawal said in the release. “Our research has shown that if retailers want to reuse collected clothing, they should facilitate it through a donation information framing, which eliminates consumers’ aversion to the profit motive and thus motivates more sustainable consumer behavior.”
The experiments included both online and field studies. In one field test at a large U.S. university, more than 2,000 students were invited to return used jeans and T-shirts under different informational framings. The results mirrored laboratory findings: generic landfill-avoidance messages produced more returns than recycling or resale messages while donation appeals performed best overall, according to the study.
The authors concluded that combining generic messaging with convenient return options can substantially improve the effectiveness of take-back programs designed to reduce textile waste.
