What happens to returned furniture?
Grading is slower than writing off. That single fact sends usable sofas to landfill.
A returned sofa has three possible futures: resale as new, resale as graded, or disposal. The decision costs money to make and the cheapest decision to make is disposal.
That is the whole story. Not consumer attitudes, not sustainability strategy. Assessment labour exceeds recovered margin, so the item goes in the skip.
Cutting assessment cost changes the arithmetic. A fixed eight-angle photo protocol takes a warehouse operative about ninety seconds and produces a consistent record. Consistency is what allows grading to be scored rather than debated, and scoring is what allows a price to be attached automatically.
In a 120-item sample, most disposals were not damaged items. They were unassessed ones.