Quick Key Facts
- Global species populations have declined by an average of 69% since 1970.
- The Endangered Species Act was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1973 and has saved 99% of the species it protects from extinction.
- At least one-third of plants and animals in the U.S. are threatened with extinction.
- Habitat loss, low genetic variation and other human impacts like pollution, wildlife trafficking, agriculture and development, and climate change are major drivers of endangerment and extinction.
- The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains the international “Red List” of endangered and threatened species.
- Scientists warn that the loss of plant and animal species due to climate change could cause an “extinction domino effect.”
The Endangered Species Act
To understand what “endangered species” means, it’s important to unpack the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which followed the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, the first piece of federal endangered species legislation. Enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1973, the ESA states that the federal government has a responsibility to protect endangered and threatened species. They must also protect the areas or regions necessary for the survival of the threatened species, called “critical habitats.”
The ESA set forth definitions of both “endangered” and “threatened” species. As stated in the Act, endangered species are “any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and threatened species are “any species which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” Species in both categories are called “listed species,” and can become “delisted” if they are no longer endangered or threatened.
It’s important to note that species can be listed as endangered at the state, federal and international level. They are managed under the ESA if they are listed at the federal level, but many states have their own versions of endangered species laws too.
How Are Species Protected Under the Act?
Species listed as threatened or endangered species then get protections by the federal government. They are protected from trade, sale and “take,” which prohibits anyone to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct” with these species, as well as interfering with breeding and behavioral activities in their critical habitat.
Three major provisions included in the Endangered Species Act lend it strength:
- Citizen suit provision. Members of the public — whether individuals or public interest groups — can petition to have a species listed as threatened or endangered, ensuring that federal agencies are taking action.
- Critical habitat provision. Agencies must protect the lands and waters that a species needs to survive and recover. When a species is listed, a critical habitat is also designated so a recovery plant can be drawn up.
- Consultation provision. Federal agencies have to avoid doing anything that jeopardizes protected species, including “adversely modifying” their critical habitats.
Ultimately, the ESA has been very successful. By some estimates, it has saved 99% of the species it protects from extinction.
How Do Species Get ‘Listed’ Under the Act?
A status review is conducted by the USFWS and NOAA to determine whether a species warrants protection under the ESA by giving it one of these designations. It’s a lengthy process for a species to get listed. It’s supposed to take only two years, but on average it takes about twelve. “Candidate” species — that is, those petitioning to become listed species — have to qualify for protected status under the ESA based on several factors.
If any of the following five factors are met, a species must be listed as endangered or threatened, according to NOAA:
- Present or threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of its habitat or range.
- Over-utilization of the species for commercial, recreational, scientific, or educational purposes.
- Disease or predation.
- Inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms.
- Other natural or manmade factors affect its continued existence.
Every five years, a review must be conducted of listed species to determine whether the criteria for the recovery plan set forward have been met. Now, more than 1,300 species are protected (or “listed”) as either endangered or threatened under the ESA in the United States.
The ‘Red List’
While the Endangered Species Act focuses on protection at the national level, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains the international “Red List” of endangered and threatened species. The IUCN compiles information on animals, plants and fungi from more than 100 countries and regions, and evaluates their risk of extinction. By their latest count, more than 44,000 species are threatened with extinction worldwide. This includes 41% of all amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 36% of reef-building corals, 34% of conifers, 27% of mammals and 13% of birds.
Red List Categories
The Threatened Species list identifies those listed as Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN) or Vulnerable (VU). Evaluations are based on five criteria: population reduction rate, geographic range, population size, population restrictions and probability of extinction. Population reduction is measured over 10 years, or three generations.
Geographic range considers the “area of occupancy” or a species, and the “extent of occurrence” — or the smallest area that could encompass all the sites that the species lives in. Smaller numbers are usually indicative of a threatened population. Lastly, “population restrictions” is a combination of population number and area of occupancy.
Species are categorized by threat level based on the five evaluated criteria, ranging from “least concern” to “extinct”:
- Least concern. There is no concern about population numbers. Human beings, pigeons, houseflies and domesticated cats and dogs would all fall under this category.
- Near threatened. The species might not be currently threatened, but will likely fall under that category in the future.
- Vulnerable species. High risk of becoming extinct in the wild.
- Population reduction rate: 30-50%
- Geographic range: Extent of occurrence is under 20,000 square kilometers, and area of occupancy is under 2,000 square kilometers.
- Population size: Fewer than 10,000 mature animals.
- Population restrictions: Restricted to under 1,000 mature individuals, or area of occupancy is under 20 square kilometers.
- Probability of extinction: 10% within 100 years
- Endangered species. Very high risk of becoming extinct in the wild.
- Population reduction rate: 50-70%
- Geographic range: Extent of occurrence is under 5,000 square kilometers, and area of occupancy is under 500 square kilometers.
- Population size: Fewer than 2,500 mature animals, or if the population has declined by 20% or more within five years or two generations.
- Population restrictions: 150 mature animals
- Probability of extinction: 20% within 20 years or 5 generations
- Critically endangered species. Extremely high risk of becoming extinct in the wild.
- Population reduction rate: 80-90%
- Geographic range: Extent of occurrence is under 100 square kilometers, area of occupancy is under 10 square kilometers.
- Population size: Fewer than 250 mature animals, or if population has declined by 25% or more within three years or one generation.
- Population restrictions: 50 mature animals
- Probability of extinction: 50% within 10 years or 3 generations
- Extinct in the wild. Includes plants that only survive in cultivation, or animals only in captivity. The term also encompasses species that are only surviving outside of their historic range.
- Extinct. There are no known individuals of the species remaining.
How Do Species Become Endangered?
Take the passenger pigeon, for example. These birds used to fly by the thousands overhead in North America but not a single passenger pigeon remains. The cause of their extinction is twofold: many were shot by humans for sport and food, and their forest habitat was cut down to build cities and plant farmland in a rapidly expanding America. They are a prime example of how human intervention can damage a species to the point of extinction — even one that once comprised 25-40% of the total bird population in the United States.
A passenger pigeon stamp on a National Wildlife Federation stamp sheet in 1966. Kevin Dooley / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Loss of Habitat
Extinction and endangerment can also happen, however, outside of human intervention. Glaciers melt after an ice age, pushing out plants and animals that can’t adapt to new conditions. A volcano can erupt and kill off an entire species. Think of the dinosaurs, who lost their habitat during the Cretaceous period when an asteroid struck the Earth. The debris sent into the atmosphere prevented light and heat from reaching the ground, and the dinosaurs were unable to adapt to this different climate. Their populations became endangered, and eventually extinct.
Increasingly, however, human activity is the reason for habitat loss. We clear enormous amounts of space for housing, agriculture and industry, leaving it inhospitable to the creatures who once lived there. When huge swaths of rainforest in South America are razed (or “deforested”) to create grazing space for cattle, the entire habitat that a species depended on is destroyed, contributing to decreases in their population. Such destruction has indirect impacts as well — while a species might not have been directly impacted by this loss, they might have depended on another impacted species as a food source, now leaving them without the necessary resources to survive.
Loss of Genetic Variation
Genetic variations allow species to adapt to changes in their environment. Without variation, species don’t develop resistance to disease or other threats, putting them at greater risk of extinction. Inbreeding prevents new genetic information from entering the gene pool, so disease is much more common and deadly within the group. Cheetahs, for instance, went through a period of inbreeding during the last ice age, so they don’t have as much genetic variation. As a result, fewer cheetahs survive to maturity than other species. Human causes like overfishing/overhunting can reduce the number of mature individuals that can breed, contributing to inbreeding.
A cheetah at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Ray in Manila / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Other Human Impacts
Extinctions have historically occurred during the five mass extinction events throughout the planet’s history, which were largely the result of natural causes. However, extinction is now occurring at a rate 1,000-10,000 times faster due to humans. Through travel and trade, humans introduce new diseases to species by spreading pathogens to new locations, and also introduce non-native species to areas where they are not meant to live, therefore altering food chains and possibly pushing out other native species. As we encroach upon the habitat of wild animals, species are at greater risk of death by car collisions and hunting too.
Pollution and Toxicity
Toxins released into the environment by humans, including pesticides, can contribute to the threatened status of species. Bald eagles were heavily impacted by DDT, which was used on farms as an insecticide and then washed into waterways where it poisoned fish. After eagles ate the poisoned fish, they began laying eggs with thin, fragile shells that cracked before the babies could hatch. Since DDT was banned in 1972, bald eagle populations have bounced back.
The introduction of trash and plastic into ecosystems by humans — especially in our oceans — can also harm species. It’s estimated that 100 million ocean animals are killed as a direct result of plastic each year.
Wildlife Trafficking and Removal From Habitats
Wildlife trafficking involves the illegal trade, smuggling, poaching, capture or collection of wildlife that’s protected, endangered or managed. It’s the second biggest direct threat to species, following only habitat destruction. The IUCN found that 958 species are at risk of extinction due to international trade. African elephants, for one, are heavily trafficked for their ivory tusks to make products like jewelry and chess sets. Consequently, fewer than 420,000 of these elephants remain of the 1.2 million that once lived in 1980.
Climate Change
Given the expansiveness of climate change and its impact, it’s no surprise that it’s a major threat to biodiversity. By 2050, some biologists estimate that 25% of plants and animals will be extinct in the wild as a result of climate change. Warmer temperatures are altering habitats and leaving species without places to breed and find food, disrupting seasonal cues for migratory animals, and causing sea level rise to damage coastal ecosystems, among many other impacts. In 2010, phytoplankton populations had dropped 40% since their 1950 levels, and rising sea surface temperatures were identified as the cause. Losing this key species that consumes carbon dioxide and produces oxygen during photosynthesis would be devastating to ocean health.
What Are the Most Endangered Species on Earth?
Animals
Amur Leopard
Only about 100 amur leopards are left in the wild, surviving only in the far east of Russia and northeastern China. Although their populations have stabilized — rising from 30 individuals in the 1970s to roughly 100 now — they have been considered “critically endangered” since 1996. They are primarily threatened by poaching for their spotted fur, habitat loss and lack of prey. Their prey base isn’t sufficient to sustain big populations, and so to help the leopards, local deer and hare species need to be protected from hunting as well.
African Forest Elephant
Once listed together with African savanna elephants, African forest elephants are now considered separately. These critically endangered elephants are found in thirty-seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and are mainly threatened by poaching and habitat loss to agricultural development. Their ivory tusks are highly valuable, and are a main reason why these elephants are poached. However, even if poaching stopped now, it would take a long time for populations to recover, since elephants reproduce slowly. Between 1928 and 2021, their populations declined more than 80%. Now, only 415,000 individuals exist in the wild in about 25% of their historic range. African forest elephants are important agents of seed dispersal. Many seeds they eat — some too large for other animals to ingest — remain intact after digestion, and thus spread to other areas while the elephants roam.
Black Rhino
Black rhinos were heavily poached between 1960 and 1995 — largely for their two horns. Their population consequently dropped by an astounding 98%, but they’ve made a large comeback since then due to conservation efforts. They are still critically endangered, and around 6,000 exist in the wild today in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Cross River Gorilla
A Cross River gorilla at the Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon. Julie Langford / CC BY-SA 3.0
While they are very difficult to study given their habitat and wariness of humans, it’s estimated that between 200 and 300 Cross River gorillas are left in the wild. They live in the montane forests and rainforests of Cameroon and Nigeria in an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. This region has been increasingly encroached upon by humans, clearing their forest habitat for agriculture or raising livestock.
Javan Rhinos
Once found across southeast Asia, only one wild Javan rhino population of seventy-five individuals exists in Java, Indonesia inside the Ujung Kulon National Park. Their population has risen from about thirty in the 1960s, but they are still critically endangered and the most threatened of the five species of rhinos. Given their tiny population, their lack of genetic diversity through inbreeding is a cause for concern about their long-term survival. The invasive Arenga palm is a big reason for their downfall — it continues to threaten the rhinos as it overtakes the park and alters their historic habitat. Rising sea levels from climate change also threaten their geographic region, as does the threat of tsunamis and volcanos from Anak Krakatau nearby. Poaching for the rhino’s horns has historically been an issue as well and remains so.
Tigers
All subspecies of tigers — the Malayan, Sumatran, South China, Indochinese, Bengal, and Amur tigers — are either endangered or critically endangered. Three subspecies of tigers are already extinct. The South China Tiger is the most critically endangered of all. With no sightings in the last thirty years, it’s considered extinct in the wild, although 150 remain in captivity. Malayan tigers have an even smaller population, with only 80-120 mature individuals remaining in the wild in the forests of Malaysia. Sumatran tiger populations are of great concern as well — there are only about 400 left in the wild on the island of Sumatra: the only place left where elephants, orangutans, rhinos and tigers live together in the wild in a delicately balanced ecosystem. As apex predators, tigers play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of ecosystems. Currently, only 4,500 total individuals remain in the wild.
Hawksbill Turtle
One of only seven species of marine turtles, the hawksbill turtle is critically endangered. Since the 1990s, 80% of its population has been lost, leaving only between 20,000 and 23,000 in all of the world’s major oceans. Hawksbills are often bycatch in large-scale fishing operations, and are poached for their beautiful shells (known as “tortoise shells”) to make jewelry and other valuables — the IUCN estimates that millions have been killed within the last hundred years for their shells. Habitat destruction is another key factor. Their nesting grounds are heavily influenced by coastal development, and climate change is impacting the coral reefs that they feed on. These turtles are very important to the functioning of marine ecosystems, especially maintaining the health of seagrass beds and coral reefs.
Vaquita
This small porpoise only lives in the Gulf of California off of Mexico. The vaquita is critically endangered — but more than that, it’s the world’s rarest marine mammal and most endangered cetacean. Currently, only ten individuals remain. These creatures are highly susceptible to entanglement in the gillnets used to fish shrimp and finfish, and it’s still a victim of bycatch fishing for totoaba, although it’s illegal.
Kākāpō
The kākāpō is a fascinating nocturnal, flightless parrot native to New Zealand, and it almost went extinct. Habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species by European settlers like rats, stoats and cats — which were especially detrimental, given that the bird doesn’t fly and hadn’t adapted to mammalian predators — were major drivers of its population decline. Only about 250 are alive today, according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, but the species has seen some growth in recent years thanks to the efforts of Kākāpō Recovery.
Plants
When we think of endangered species, we might think only of animals, but plants are also in danger of extinction. Similarly to captive animals, some plants exist only in cultivation now, like the Middlemist Red (the rarest flower on Earth), the Franklin Tree and the Wood’s Cycad. Among the many listed by the IUCN Red List, these are three of the most highly threatened plant species.
Western Underground Orchid (Rhizanthella johnstonii)
The species Rhizanthella johnstonii occurs in Western Australia. Fred Hort / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
This orchid is considered crucially endangered in its native Australia with only fifty remaining individual plants. It lives its whole life underground and relies on a specific kind of mycorrhizal fungus to survive. Habitat loss is a big reason for its decline, particularly for agriculture. Drought has impacted species that it depends upon for nutrients, as has the invasion of weeds and compaction of soil by humans, particularly when hunting for it.
Texas Prairie Dawn Flower
Texas prairie dawn flowers. Carolyn Fannon / Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
Formerly known as Texas bitterweed, this plant was renamed by school children in an attempt to improve negative attitudes towards it during conservation efforts. Now dubbed the Texas prairie dawn flower, this extremely rare annual wildflower is only found in the Texas Gulf Coastal Plain in the Fort Bend, Gregg, Harris and Trinity counties of Texas. Harris County — the home of Houston — is rapidly developing and contributing to the destruction of the flower’s habitat.
Ceroxylon quindiuense (Quindio Wax Palm)
Colombia’s national tree, the Quindio Wax Palm, is native to the montane forests of the Andes in both Colombia and Ecuador. Its endangered status arose after deforestation and agriculture began encroaching upon its territory. The palms’ seedlings die in the hot sun or are eaten by other creatures, so they aren’t able to reproduce outside of a forest. Wax palm forests are important to the survival of the yellow-eared parrot, among other species.
Fungi
Even though we often can’t see them, fungi are a crucial component of our lives. They are in everything, from the water we drink, the ground under our feet and the air we breathe. According to National Geographic, about 168 mushrooms have been assessed as threatened worldwide.
White Ferula Mushroom
White ferula mushrooms. tripsis / Flickr / CC BY-SA 3.0
This extremely rare mushroom is only found north of the island of Sicily in an area of less than 100 square kilometers. Their critically endangered status is due largely to overharvesting — as a gourmet food item, two pounds of white ferula sells for fifty euros.
Why Should We Protect Endangered Species?
Once a species is gone from the Earth, there is no way of getting it back. Protecting natural biodiversity has benefits we can predict, and some that we can’t. No one creature exists in a vacuum, but is connected to a large, delicate web of all species. Losing one species has a great impact on the balance of that web, especially when we lose a “keystone” species that helps hold the whole system together.
Protection of Food Chains
Species depend upon one another to survive. Since one species is a source of food for another, losing one can be disastrous to countless others, sending a ripple of disturbance down the food chain. We can see examples of such “trophic cascades” — that cascading effect of species loss down the food chain — throughout history. From the late 1800s to the 1920s, wolves in Yellowstone National Park were hunted nearly to extinction. In response, the populations of elk and deer they once preyed upon exploded, and decimated aspens and other trees that held stream banks together and supported birds. Insect populations burgeoned without their avian predators. Wolves were listed as endangered in 1974 and their recovery was thus mandated under the ESA. After wolves were reintroduced in the park in the 1990s, these decimated food chains recovered. The loss of apex species — the largest predators at the top of the food chain — like Yellowstone’s wolves is especially harmful. Because they tend to live longer and reproduce at slower rates, it also takes longer to recover their populations.
Scientists warn that the loss of plant and animal species due to climate change could cause an “extinction domino effect” of “co-extinctions,” which occur when one species dies out because it depended on another, causing subsequent extinctions down the food chain. In the worst-case scenario, this could kill off all life on Earth, according to a recent study from Flinders University in 2018.
Maintaining Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services
Balanced ecosystems are important. They provide us with crucial ecosystem services like flood regulation, water purification and nutrient cycling, which won’t function as well without all native species. California sea otter populations, for example, dropped in the 19th century from unrestricted hunting. The otters used to eat purple sea urchins, which eat kelp. Now, urchin populations have grown in the absence of otter predators, meaning they consume more kelp. Kelp forests provide important ecosystem services — like protecting the coast from storm surges and absorbing climate-warming carbon dioxide — but are less successful as their population diminishes.
Pollinators also provide vital ecological benefits. Over the past several decades, pollinator populations have been declining in North America. As of 2020, seventy species of pollinators including bats, birds and insects are listed as threatened or endangered. An estimated 75% of leading food crops depend on pollinators to grow — our entire food system depends on them. About 300 species of fruit depend on bats to get pollinated, including mangos and bananas. All pollinators face different threats, like imported diseases, invasive species and shrinking habitats, especially if patches along their migration routes are too fragmented. Pesticides pose another significant danger to pollinators. These toxins impact reproduction or harm the health of bees during direct contact. Additionally, insects and other animals could be beneficial to farmers as biological controls to keep pests in check. If we lose these species, we will rely even more heavily on synthetic chemicals to replace this service.
Preservation of Knowledge
Plants and animals also provide us with resources, like materials and new types of medicine. They’ve helped us create anti-cancer agents, blood thinners, pain killers and antibiotics, including penicillin, which was derived from a fungus. In all, 50% of the 150 top prescribed medicines were originally derived from plants and animals. Biodiversity presents us with the opportunity for new ways of feeding and sustaining our growing population, but by losing species to extinction, we lose that opportunity to innovate.
Loss of Livelihood
Whale-watching tourists in the Pacific Ocean off Puerto Vallarta, Mexico on March 8, 2022. Troy Mai / Flickr
Biodiverse communities are a source of income for many communities. Taking fishing communities, for example; if the fish they depend on are overfished to extinction, these people won’t be able to make any money. Biodiversity also has recreational value, providing us with opportunities for watching species like whales and birds, hiking on trails full of natural beauty, and more. The wildlife tourism industry is a multi-billion dollar sector, and the loss of species means the loss of major aesthetic value in these places, meaning tourism-centric economies will suffer.
Takeaway
Endangered species protection is a complex and intersectional issue. Species become threatened or extinct in a lot of different ways, some more indirect than habitat loss or poaching. Thus, to meaningfully address extinction risks, we must also consider climate change, our food systems and agricultural practices, and pollution.
Legislation is one of our strongest tools in fighting extinction, with the Endangered Species Act being a highly successful example. The whooping crane is a famous success story: the tallest bird in North America suffered from loss of habitat and hunting. In 1941 when it was listed as endangered, there were only twenty-one individuals left in its population — but after being listed as endangered in 1970, it now has more than 500. Other influential pieces of legislation throughout history include the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940 and the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.
The Endangered Species Act turns 50 years old in 2023, but it and other legislation that protects endangered species are constantly under threat. Under the Trump administration, the ESA was stripped of vital provisions, ultimately paving the way for development, oil and gas drilling, and mining in critical habitats of endangered species. Although the Biden administration has begun restoring protections under the Act, these actions remind us that legislation is a powerful tool in preventing harm to threatened species: one that can be taken away under leadership that neglects environmental conservation. To protect endangered species and their habitats, it’s crucial that we vote for individuals who prioritize legislation related to environmental protection and large-scale action against climate change.
The post Endangered Species 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
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Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click to get a larger image.
This week’s quote from author and PBS host Steven Johnson gives us confidence that the post-carbon economy can be achieved: “[E]very now and then, some individual or group makes a leap that seems almost like time traveling.”
This poster was originally published on August 9, 2019.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: Steven Johnson — Innovation Is Like Time Travel appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/inspire/earth911-inspiration-steven-johnson-innovation-is-like-time-travel/
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Plastic Bank’s David Katz on Grassroots Recycling Solutions
Turn back the clock to our first conversation with David Katz, founder of Plastic Bank. He shares his vision for a regenerative society built on grassroots recycling programs that help low-income regions build resilient communities. The Vancover, B.C., startup compensates more than 30,000 plastic recyclers in the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and Egypt. To date, Plastic Bank has stopped over 99 million pounds of plastic waste — the equivalent of more than 2 billion plastic bottles — from entering the world’s oceans, and the pace of its collections is accelerating. The people who collect plastic are paid for the material they deposit at more than 511 Plastic Bank branches. Katz’s team has partnered with more than 200 companies, including Procter & Gamble, HelloFresh, L’Oreal, and Coca-Cola, to create circular economies in plastic packaging.
Their next goal is to capture 10 billion bottles, which still represents only 1.7% of the 583 billion produced in 2021, according to Euromonitor. David explains that a shift in mindset from extractive ownership to regenerative stewardship can break the economic mold and bring prosperity in regions where so much valuable material currently is treated as waste. Plastic Bank uses a blockchain-based data collection and reporting system that helps collectors track their earnings and which provides transparency and traceability for the plastic captured. Plastic Bank works with plastic recyclers to convert the collected bottles into SocialPlastic, a raw material for making new products. They sell plastic #1, #2, and #4 to industry to recover their costs. You can learn more about Plastic Bank at plasticbank.com.
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on March 23, 2022.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Plastic Bank’s David Katz on Grassroots Recycling Solutions appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/earth911-podcast-plastic-banks-david-katz-on-grassroots-recycling-solutions/
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns
$850 billion. That’s what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn’t look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it.
The fix isn’t a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What’s missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object. When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That’s what circularity looks like when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one. Follow Don’s work at WhatTheyThink.com and on X at @DCarli.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:08
Hello — good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s take another look at the topic of e-commerce returns and how to reduce them by tuning the economy for less waste. We’re going to start with making what you see online look like what you receive on your doorstep.
Now here’s a number that should stop you in your tracks the next time you shop online: $850 billion. That’s how much retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026. And here’s another number: 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste generated by those returns in a single year — roughly the same as burying 10,500 fully loaded Boeing 747s in the ground. That’s a lot of waste.
Now you might assume that most of these returns are about fit — pants that don’t fit, shoes that pinch. But 22% of consumers report returning items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles categories, where fit isn’t the issue, that percentage climbs even higher. A sofa that passes every quality specification still gets returned because it clashes with the throw pillow that also passed every specification — when they don’t look alike in the home, both can end up in a landfill, because repackaging costs more than recovery.
Today’s conversation is about why that happens and what we can do about it. My guest today is Don Carli. Don’s a good friend and the founder of the consulting firm NEMA Hunter Incorporated. Two of Don’s recent articles on the site What They Think got me thinking about how an apparently esoteric discussion of color calibration and spectral profiles actually represents something much larger — the fine-tuning we can do to the 20th-century industrial system that was never designed to connect digital promises to physical reality.
Don is also a Senior Research Fellow with the nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communication, where he has directed programs on corporate responsibility, sustainability, advertising, marketing, and enterprise communication. He’s also a member of the board of advisors for the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design and a member of the Institute for Supply Management.
So here’s why this matters beyond the print and packaging industry, where Don has spent most of his career. The 20th century built industrial systems optimized for mass production: make a lot, ship it out, and hope people keep it. These systems created enormous efficiencies on the one hand, but they also created enormous waste — often hidden in the seams between suppliers, brands, and retailers, where no single stakeholder owns enough of the problem to force a solution. In fact, it really means nobody lost enough money to care.
What Don’s work reveals is that we now have the technical architecture to fine-tune these legacy systems — not replace them, but recalibrate them. The standards exist. The measurement hardware exists. The digital rendering pipelines exist. What’s missing is the coordination: getting brands, retailers, and others to share data they currently hold separately, and to recognize that the costs they’re each absorbing individually are symptoms of the same system failure — a failure of color calibration.
And this is what sustainability can look like in practice: not moonshot reinventions, but the patient technical work of closing gaps between digital and physical, between specification and reality, and between what we promise customers and what we deliver. If we get this right, we can reduce waste, cut costs, and rebuild trust with consumers who’ve learned to expect that what they see online isn’t quite what they’re going to get.
You can follow Don’s work on X. His handle is @DCarli — that’s spelled D-C-A-R-L-I, all one word, no space, no dash.
So can we calibrate what we see online with what we experience when we open a package, reducing the need to return a purchase? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:29
Welcome to the show, Don. How are you doing today?
Don Carli 4:31
Fantastic, Mitch. I’m really glad to be here with you today and looking forward to the conversation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:37
Always great to talk with you, Don. This came up in our discussions over the past couple of months, and then I read the article and wanted to follow up. To start off, can you walk us through a typical scenario? A customer orders a navy sectional and a matching throw pillow from different suppliers. They appear to be the same color — they both pass all the quality specifications we’ve talked about — but under the living room lights, the consumer finds they clash. What happened between the approved image and her disappointment? Where did the system break down?
Don Carli 5:15
We’ve all had this experience at some point in our lives. In part, it’s because of the nature of human perception. We would like to think that color is a constant thing, but color is an interaction of multiple variables.
One variable is the light source — specifically, the distribution of wavelengths in that light. As you know, the visible spectrum is a small part of all the radiation there is. There’s ultraviolet light you can’t see, there’s infrared light you can’t see, and then there’s all the colors in between — the ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — the colors we’re familiar with. Every light source has a different distribution of those energies.
Second, the material an object is made of has its own capacity to absorb different wavelengths, and that can vary. So you have variation in the energies emitted by the light source, variation in the energies absorbed and reflected by the object, and then there’s the viewer. Our visual system takes up a big part of our brain — it’s not just our eyes, but our eyes have a lot to do with it. Some of us are colorblind, for example, and in other cases, color is simply not a constant thing.
I worked with the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers for many years — he wrote the book The Interaction of Color. He used to say, ‘When you put one color next to another color, you get a third color for free,’ because those two colors interact with each other.
To put it simply: you put on a pair of socks and a pair of pants in your bedroom under incandescent light. The pants are brown, the socks are brown. You go out into the daylight. The pants look green. The socks are still brown. What happened? The light changed. Because daylight has more energy at one end of the spectrum, it reflects more blue light, making the brown look greener.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:56
That’s really interesting to think about — how we’ve moved from an era of commerce where, say, items in the Sears catalog were originally sketched, versus photographed. As we introduced greater verisimilitude in our catalogs, or on Amazon —
Don Carli 8:17
We set expectations differently. Exactly.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:20
So how should we think about the expectations we’re setting — both as sellers of things and as consumers? How should we be thinking about this?
Don Carli 8:30
In part, most of this is simply not taught. Most students in grade school, high school, or even university are not given any exposure to the psychology of human perception. There’s a physiological and psychological basis to all of this, and we just don’t know about it.
The problem has always existed. What’s happened with e-commerce — and with sophisticated computer graphic rendering of objects that don’t yet exist in the real world but look real — is that we’re setting expectations. On my screen I see this couch. It looks brown. The pillows look brown. So I expect that when they arrive, they’re both going to look brown.
Unfortunately, the lighting in homes now is no longer even incandescent. LEDs have really unusual spectral curves — they can be the problem. If I had been able to see what those items were going to look like under the lighting in my home, I might be less disappointed. I’d say, ‘Oh, wait — they don’t match.’ But in developing the systems for e-commerce, the companies that develop software for rendering — the tools designers use to develop the rendering of images for websites and monitors — simply don’t take these things into consideration.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:10
Our economy was massified in the 20th century but it’s moving toward personalization in the 21st century. And what you’re describing — what you named in the article — is metamerism.
Don Carli 10:21
It’s not my term. It’s metamerism — or ‘metamerism,’ yes. That’s fine.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:27
This phenomenon, combined with changing lighting technology and the changing nature of our homes — which can allow more or less light in, and offer a variable lighting palette —
Don Carli 10:37
A variable lighting palette, yeah.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:38
— suggests that the palette will always be changing. So how do we create consistent expectations among consumers when we’re trying to communicate what we offer?
Don Carli 10:57
Well, standards help to begin with. We do not have a set of coordinated standards today that allow the designer to anticipate the observer’s environment and lighting conditions for a given product. Second, we don’t have standards in place to communicate between what the designer intends and what the manufacturer produces — because it is possible to create pigments and dyes that do not exhibit metamerism. Really.
It’s been standard practice in some industries where it matters. If you go to an informed paint company and say, ‘I want a non-metameric match of this swatch,’ they would use a device called a spectrophotometer, which measures the absorption curve of the pigments employed — so that under any lighting condition, the appearance doesn’t change, because the curves have been matched.
But I can create a match that only looks correct under one light source, which is typically what happens when people revert to either a monitor — which only has three emitters: red, green, and blue — or printing, where typically you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If you want to truly match, you have to match the curve.
New printers being used for digital textiles actually have 10 channels, and it is possible to use pigments across those channels to make the absorption curve of the material non-metameric — or at least less metameric. We’re waiting for standards to come together, and that will only happen, I believe, if the brands suffering the greatest economic loss from this mismatch problem take action to put the requirements in their purchase orders and to support pilots that address that 22% of returns due to color perception that you described.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:27
You do point out that IKEA, Amazon, Wayfair, and others have funded the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group to ensure that products look consistent across different apps and websites. So they want consistency when rendered on a digital screen, but they’re apparently okay with the fact they don’t look the same when they arrive?
Don Carli 13:54
Yes, I like the disconnect. It’s interesting. First of all, it would require collaboration across industry — across groups that don’t typically talk to each other. I don’t think it’s willful. I think it’s more like, ‘Wow, they just haven’t gotten around to that.’ Nobody fully realized how much was at stake. And the potential for a connection between the two standards that do exist is actually very good and straightforward, because they’re both extensible standards.
What’s needed — as I said — is for the businesses that are right now losing approximately $850 billion a year due to returns to ask: How much of that is attributable to consumers who’ve been given permission by e-commerce companies to say, ‘Something doesn’t look right, so I want to return it’? We’ve made it easy to return things.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:09
The customer was always right.
Don Carli 15:11
That’s correct. And it’s going to be hard to put that one back in the bottle. So now we have to ask: out of the $850 billion — which is just the retail cost of the goods, not the cost of reverse logistics, not the cost of reprocessing, not the disposal of that returned product to landfill or incineration — if you take it all together, it’s probably $1.25 trillion, maybe even $1.5 trillion. And if you said, ‘Okay, but how much of that is because somebody said the colors don’t match?’ — even being very conservative, say 10% — that’s still enough money to justify addressing the root cause of the problem.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:00
$150 to $200 billion….
Don Carli 16:03
Just rounding error, right? So you could say to companies like Adobe — that develop the software for rendering objects that are going to be manufactured — take IKEA as an example. IKEA doesn’t fill its catalogs, whether online or physical (though there’s no longer a physical catalog), with actual photography. Those are computer-generated images. They look real, but they don’t exist in the physical world when rendered. Very often, the product isn’t manufactured until after you’ve bought it — you bought it on the basis of a computer graphic rendering that looks photorealistic. It’s called Physically Based Rendering.
So if those systems were specifying color with the manufacturing process in mind — which is very often digital textiles printing — they could choose their colors to be less subject to metamerism, or even to specifically eliminate metamerism. They could also provide the ability to predict: run the model through a set of tests to see, ‘Is this design going to be subject to metamerism?’ And carry that logic forward to the manufacturer. They’d have to put that in their purchase orders. They’d have to bridge two standards — one called glTF, the other called ICC Max.
The point is, the consumer doesn’t need to know any of this. The consumer needs to understand that it’s possible to make things match under different lighting conditions — or at least to have less divergence from their expectations under different lighting conditions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:58
I agree that the consumer should be able to expect that. What I hear is that so far, the pain hasn’t been great enough. But we’re also at a point where simply reducing the waste would be worthwhile on its own, with other benefits as well —
Don Carli 18:10
Oh, absolutely. But the financial ones alone —
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:15
The financial ones are enough? Yes. And then all the environmental and social costs of returns on top of that. But let’s talk about how to actually hack toward a solution. Is it possible now — or over the course of the next decade, say — for me to have a phone app that I use in my home? I sample the light in the morning, I sample the light at noon, I sample it at sundown, and in the evening — sometimes with external light, sometimes with just internal. I could say, ‘This is my light profile. Give me things that will look like what I expect.’
Don Carli 19:00
That’s a great question. The question is: would the average consumer go to that extent? Probably not. But the retailer could do what amounts to a survey of the whole home that the products are going to go into. If it’s a major purchase — a couch, carpets, a new home — you could model the interior of that house very easily.
Technologies like Matterport, for example, can scan the interior of a house and give you a virtual view of what it looks like — they use it in real estate all the time. So that’s possible. And it’s also possible to model different lighting scenarios: you say, ‘I’m going to put in LED lighting with variable color temperature, so during the day I may look at it under one light, and at night it’s going to be warmer.’ You can factor in where natural light comes in through windows across the year.
But that may be overkill for most consumers. It might be appropriate for businesses — especially places where the harmony of floor coverings, wall coverings, and furnishing objects matters. Still, it shouldn’t be necessary for the average consumer.
Phones are increasingly gaining the ability to sense color in a spectral sense. I think within three years, that capability should be standard in most phones as a matter of course, and more specialized devices will be available for around $100 if you want them. But I think it’s really incumbent on the retailer and the brands — not on the consumer — to meet expectations first and foremost. And I think an increasing number of consumers who care about environmental and social costs are going to put that expectation on the retailer and the brand: model the environment, predict the degree to which the products being manufactured are subject to metamerism. Those variables can be measured and controlled in design and manufacturing so that the in-home or in-store environment is less subject to lighting variation affecting the perception of color match.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:55
So I think this is a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break, because we’ve set the stage — and the lighting — to talk about what’s going to come next. Let’s figure out the hack. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:13
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with my friend Don Carli. He’s founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York City.
Don, so we understand the variability of light, the variability of settings, the combination of colors — all of these affect our perception of color. And we talked about the fact that phones will have increasing photographic analysis capabilities, so they can sense the full spectrum, not just what we see but the entire range of light affecting our perception. But as you say, it really is incumbent upon the retailer to have a solution that makes something look like my expectation when it arrives at my home. Is this a suggestion that the future of retail is more personalized — that there may be personal shoppers who come to your home early in a brand relationship and do a scan, or who give you the tool? Maybe they send it to you and you return it after completing your color profile. Are we at the beginning of really tuning the economy to deliver exactly what we want so that waste can be reduced?
Don Carli 23:29
I think there are examples of it already in place. There’s a very interesting company that grew out of a team of Navy SEALs and special operations people who had to model environments they were going to enter — and they couldn’t do that using big, complex systems. They needed a hack. They were able to take imagery from various sources and build a 3D model reconstruction of a building so they could plan their approach. One of them left and started a company called Hover.
This isn’t a commercial for Hover, but it’s an interesting case. Hover solved a problem for people who wanted to remodel the exterior of their homes. You could take your phone, take six to eight photos of your house from the exterior, send those photos to Hover, and they would create a 3D reconstruction of your home. Then they worked with manufacturers of siding, roofing, and windows, and allowed the builder to generate not only an estimate of what it would cost to put new siding and windows on your house, but a rendering of what it would look like. The precedent is there: the consumer had the device, nobody had to go out to do an estimate, the contractor loved it because they didn’t have to send anyone to measure — all done accurately using cell phone imagery.
Matterport is another company that makes a device for interiors and does the same thing. And there are small sensors that a retailer could send you that measure color temperature of light — but I don’t think that will be strictly necessary.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:31
Nor necessarily environmentally responsible, to send out loads of sensors.
Don Carli 25:34
Exactly. So for the retailer, like Radio Shack, if it’s an in-store environment, that’s one thing — they do have the ability to simulate different lighting conditions in-store. Think of it like going to an audio shop —
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:54
You can’t do that anymore, but okay.
Don Carli 25:56
Just imagine going to buy a stereo, or to an audiophile shop —
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:03
We’re showing our age, knowing what that is.
Don Carli 26:05
They bring you into a listening room. The point is, it’s constructed for the purpose of evaluating what something is likely to sound like in your home. I think we can do the same thing in-store with variable lighting.
But online is becoming e-commerce where items are never in a store. You order from a computer-rendered image on your screen, and after your order is placed, the item is manufactured. That’s the link that has to be established: the link between the creator of the design for the object and the supply chain instructions provided to the manufacturer, so that the objects are not subject to metamerism — so they are less subject to variation in the lighting conditions in your home. It is a matter of giving the correct instructions about the materials to be used, and specifying how they’re to be measured by the manufacturer. The brands that design the couch, the pillow, the carpet, the curtain, the flooring — they should own the equipment to do the measurement and support the linkage of the standards that communicate how to maintain color consistency across different lighting and viewing conditions, so the consumer isn’t disappointed.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:41
This brings me to another concept you introduced, which is the appearance bill of materials — which is in many ways similar to the digital product passports we’ve talked about on the show a number of times, which describe a product’s components and potentially how to recycle it. But this color profile — what would be involved in making that happen at scale? What would it look like to make that a common practice for a furniture retailer, for instance?
Don Carli 28:10
Think of recipes. The way a fabric is produced is changing because of digital printing. We used to make fabric in large quantities using dyes — extremely polluting, very complex — or with high-volume screen printing using fixed screens. Increasingly, fabric printing is achieved digitally, where you can print just one yard or 10 yards of a material using any palette of pigments, matched not just to look correct under one lighting condition, but to look consistent under any lighting condition.
The example of metamerism is: if I have two objects that are supposed to match, and under one lighting condition they do match, but under another they don’t — that is metameric. It changes. But if I blend, or use the right pigment recipe on a given substrate material, they will match regardless of the lighting condition. The pillow matches the couch, the wall covering matches the floor covering.
To do that, you have recipes. I’m going to use this combination of inks, and I have to measure them with a spectrophotometer. The specifier has to tell the manufacturer what the material characteristics are. It’s the same as saying, ‘Use butter, sugar, and flour’ — but not all butter, sugar, and flour are the same. Or like architects who say, ‘Use concrete, aluminum, steel, and wood’ — but what’s the actual recipe for the steel, the concrete, the wood? We have to be more specific at the design and manufacturing stages.
It is kind of like a digital product passport. The standard for glTF, which is used for Physically Based Rendering on monitors, is consistent for rendering on screens — but it doesn’t extend to the world of physical objects, inks, and substrates.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:59
So that’s the link. Thank you. You’ve also pointed out that the GMI certification — which Target, Home Depot, and CVS began to require, and which describes packaging — was broadly accepted once those brands introduced it. Would color matching with the guarantee that it will look like what you saw when you receive it be a significant differentiator — a value-added differentiator — that would set a brand apart if they embraced and practiced it consistently?
Don Carli 31:34
Why not? We know that consumers are disappointed enough to go through the return process — and it’s not simple. It’s an annoyance. You’re putting people out of their way. They want their couch, they want their cushions, they want their floor covering. They don’t want to go through what it takes. It’s going to be another two weeks, and I’ve got to document all of this, and I have a party this Friday — we’re getting married, whatever it is.
So I think the demand is there. And what GMI established reflects something I believe has been true in manufacturing as long as I’ve known it: manufacturers are going to do what their customers call them to do. If the requirement in the purchase order is that you must adopt this standard or use this material, you don’t argue — if you want the work, you do it. But if you leave innovation in materials to manufacturers and expect them to market and sell it, that’s not their strength. They’re not marketers.
On the other hand, retailers and brands are marketers — and ultimately, the cost is not just economic but environmental and social. That’s where I think today’s consumers, if made aware, will be able to apply enough incentive to brands to build those linkages, use those standards to minimize the cost of returns and the environmental impact of returns, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:30
So the cost of these returns — which we’ve estimated in the $1.3 to $1.5 trillion range — who actually ends up paying that? Would solving this problem represent a tangible reduction in costs for consumers overall?
Don Carli 33:47
It is costing consumers in the end. Let’s say a retailer bought the product for 25% of the retail price. So the thing sold for $100 but cost them $25. When they say they lost $850 billion, they’re estimating that at the full retail price — but it only cost them $25.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:19
Of course, because that gives them an advantage in taxes — but if —
Don Carli 34:23
If in fact they’re losing 25% of their sales to returns, that’s still going to factor into what they mark things up to recover those costs. It does impact the cost to consumers in the end. And then there are the real costs associated with reverse logistics — shipping it back from you to the distribution center — and then that has to be reprocessed: someone has to inventory it now that it’s been returned, inspect it to see if it’s viable for resale, find a resale partner. Or, as some retailers now do, they simply keep them in huge containers labeled as ‘lot number four’ and have people bid on them sight unseen — unpack those, find the few things in the box that were worth something, and discard the rest.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:33
So the consumer today expects greater and greater personalization, as you’ve described. On-demand manufacturing is a potentially scalable solution that’s beginning to emerge. But if we don’t master this metameric strategy, returns may actually increase — because the expectation is even greater that it should look exactly like it did when I ordered it.
Don Carli 35:59
Yeah. Appearance mismatch is not the greatest reason for returns — but it’s a substantial percentage.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:12
My point is to think systemically, rather than just about this particular issue. Is this the right time for us to move toward on-demand manufacturing — particularly now that we want to reduce imports? And if we do that, who should convene the effort to create consistent perception of color and quality for that next generation of a much less wasteful economy?
Don Carli 36:43
I think it ultimately falls to the brands and the retailers, as well as the technology providers for rendering — for the design and rendering of the objects — because circularity and circular thinking is a systems design challenge. You want to design the problem out of existence, rather than trying to cope with it downstream.
There’s no question that the greatest potential leverage is through a better design process that anticipates these downstream factors that lead to returns — whatever they are, whether it’s appearance, fit, or any other reason why people return things. The ability to predict through true digital twins of the object is one key element. You need the NVIDIAs of the world, the Adobes, the Hewlett-Packards, and the instrument manufacturers who can measure color and surface characteristics — the things that allow you to define the recipe for making the object, as well as the recipe for rendering it on screen.
Those are the key stakeholders: the brands using those tools, the companies providing those tools, and the standards bodies that help to encode them in open, extensible standards that allow businesses to communicate one-to-many, instead of being locked into proprietary one-to-one communication chains.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:26
If a brand is listening, what should their first diagnostic step be? Where’s the right place to begin?
Don Carli 38:36
The first step, of course, is to have a breakdown of the reasons for returns. If they want to address appearance mismatch, they need to know what percentage of their returns are reported by consumers as: ‘The product I received didn’t meet my expectations in appearance compared to what I saw on my screen or in the store.’ They need to know first: is this a problem big enough to make a business case for addressing it?
In most cases, I think they’ll find that if it’s 10%, 15%, or 20% of returns, that’s material. And if they looked at it not just economically but in terms of environmental and social impact — triple bottom line, if you will — I think they can make a business case for why they should seek out a group of like-minded brands to address the root cause through standards and paid pilot programs with manufacturers: to establish and prove that a workflow is possible, practical, and delivers results that reduce cost in a material way, reduce environmental impact in a measurable way, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:15
You do a lot of product research and market research. Are brands thinking about this?
Don Carli 40:21
Not enough. Not enough. I believe brands like IKEA do take it quite seriously — and maybe that’s one of the luxuries of being a privately owned entity. So I think we can look to brands like IKEA for leadership. They’ve exhibited that in the past and can continue. But one brand can’t solve this. This is a bigger problem than any one brand can handle.
I think the path forward is really through a coalition of brands that work together and share the costs, the risks, and the benefits of connecting these existing standards — to the benefit of not just current consumers, but consumers going forward. And I think it will reduce the impact on the environment, help make better use of our manufacturing capacity and digital technology, and support onshoring more of our production. That’s an important way to minimize risk — not just the risk of returns, but supply chain risk as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:39
What you’re describing is an optimized system that we don’t currently have. I know we’ve only scratched the surface of the color perception problem here, Don. Thank you for helping me understand it. How can folks follow what you’re working on?
Don Carli 41:53
I write on this topic in an industry publication called WhatTheyThink.com. And there is an active discussion taking place within the Khronos Group, 3D Commerce, and related standards bodies about this general concept of Physically Based Rendering. In the printing world, there’s another group called the International Color Consortium — ICC.org — that has been looking at the problem from a manufacturing perspective: how do you manage appearance, not just color but appearance overall, because it’s not only the color of a thing that can differ, sometimes it’s the surface characteristics or texture. These standards take both into consideration.
I think some preliminary discussions are starting to emerge — whether in Reddit or in these two groups, which are open — that are beginning to look at how these things connect.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:59
There’s a saying that an airplane is a set of standards in flight. What we’re talking about here is the setting of a standard set of expectations about how our economy should work efficiently. I hope folks take to heart what we talked about today. I want to thank you for your time, Don; this was a fascinating conversation.
Don Carli 43:19
I think it can have a profound impact on the amount of waste that goes to landfill, and I think it will also improve the ability to satisfy increasingly conscious consumers along the way. Thank you, Mitch. Take care.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:49
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Don Carli, founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York. Don’s commentary on color perception, metamerism, and the gaps in our digital-to-physical rendering pipeline appears regularly at WhatTheyThink.com — all one word, no space, no dash — and you can follow him on X at @DCarli, that’s D-C-A-R-L-I.
This conversation started with a sofa and a throw pillow that refused to match, and it ended somewhere much larger. The $850 billion in annual e-commerce returns we discussed — growing toward $1.25 to $1.5 trillion when you add reverse logistics and disposal costs — is what happens when a 20th-century industrial system tries to serve 21st-century expectations without changing its underlying architecture. The system was designed to produce at scale and absorb returns as a cost of doing business. The consumer was always right. The platform made returns frictionless. And what got lost in the middle — in landfills, in incinerators, and in the carbon cost of reverse logistics — was invisible to the balance sheet and to the customer who clicked ‘return.’ In other words, we engineered a system to overwhelm people with choice so that they would inevitably buy, but at the cost of tremendous waste.
So Don isn’t just describing a color problem. It’s a calibration problem — and calibration is a systems problem. You heard about all the parts of the solution that are available already. What doesn’t exist is a coordination layer: the shared commitment by brands and retailers to making a product and the recipe for showing it on screen speak the same language, so that it represents things accurately across a variety of different lighting settings.
The transition Don is pointing toward is from mass manufacturing to what we might call calibrated manufacturing — production designed not just to meet a specification, but to meet the specific expectations of one person. Personalized manufacturing. The on-demand, digital-first model that’s already emerging will only work if the variety of perceptions we experience is accounted for from the start. If we move to on-demand without solving the metamerism problem, Don warned, returns will increase, not decrease. We will have built a faster, more responsive system for disappointing people.
The circular economy framing that anchors so much of this podcast is usually applied to materials — keep them in use, close the loop on plastics, design products for disassembly and reuse. But Don’s argument adds a dimension we don’t talk about enough: design for reduced returns is design for circularity too. The waste reduction potential is real, and it needs to happen upstream — at the design and specification stage — before a single unit of the product actually ships.
This is what tuning the economy looks like in practice: not a moonshot reinvention of everything, but the patient technical work of closing the gaps — the many gaps between what we promise and what we deliver as businesses. The leverage points are well defined. Brands and retailers that own product specifications need to bridge the color standards challenge in their purchase orders. And consumers who are already demanding more and returning more can apply market pressure too, especially the growing segment of people for whom systems thinking and environmental impact are part of how they evaluate a brand. But we have to communicate that to the brand and to the policymakers around that market in order to drive systemic change.
Don’s closing thought is what stays with me: when we actually tune the system to deliver what people want and expect, we can stop producing waste that nobody intended and nobody wants. That’s not just good business. That’s what a circular economy looks like in practice when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one — the place where, right now, billions of pounds of material quietly disappear into the ground.
We’ll continue to explore this — we’ll probably have Don back to talk more — and in the meantime, I hope you take a look at our archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, folks, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’re going to want to share with a friend or member of your family. And by the way, writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-don-carli-on-tuning-what-we-see-online-to-reduce-ecommerce-returns/
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