An employee who appeared to work for Dollar General exposed the company's careless trash policy on Reddit's r/Anticonsumption forum. The employee shared a photo of a stack of unsold magazines and said they were forced to throw them out.
"Typical stack of magazines at work that we have to throw out and can't take. This goes for all expired or damaged products. They're thrown in the garbage and anything taken is considered theft," the employee wrote.
"Can they at least be recycled?" one Redditor asked.
Dumpster divers in the United States have been exposing the amount of items from retail stores that unfortunately end up in the trash — from beauty products and clothes to food items and toys.
According to a report from Avery Dennison, 8% of surplus products end up getting thrown out annually. That percentage of waste accounts for $163 billion of inventory.
While some companies have been taking action to properly recycle and accept donations of items to repurpose, such as used plastic pill bottles, many stores throw out excess products. When waste breaks down in a landfill, it releases harmful gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, that contribute to rising global temperatures.
Redditors were shocked and frustrated by the image of the trash-bound magazines, but they offered suggestions for reusing the products.
"Too bad you couldn't drop them off at a library or school or something," one user wrote.
"Magazines work great as a makeshift palette for painting," another Redditor commented. "Donating them to a school art class would at least get them some use."
"I used to work at my local library during college, and every time we would discontinue magazines, they told me to do this. I asked if I could take them and they said, 'Sure.' So I would take stacks back to my college for my multimedia art teacher to give to students to use for collage projects," one Redditor wrote.
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