The Loading Dock Doesn’t Lie — Why Circular Logistics Must Start with the End in Mind

PlanITROI

May 28, 2025

In the world of returns, every extra mile a product travels is a silent cost – not just in emissions or shipping fees, but in trust. Trust that the right thing will be done with that product. Trust that it’ll get a second life, not a slower death in a warehouse backlog. Paul Baum has spent 25 years listening to the loading dock, not the marketing deck, and what he hears is this: most companies are still stuck in linear thinking, even when the returns are piling up.

As CEO of PlanITROI and founder of Nextra Tech, Baum is doing something refreshingly simple: he’s treating returned products like they matter. His “one box solution” skips the grand tour of middlemen, distributors, and stock rotation rules. That returned laptop, phone, or server? It goes straight to one of his facilities – think a high-tech pit stop where it’s tested with OEM software, refurbished, regraded, and resold directly to the next user. No warehouses gathering dust. No fake circularity. Manual return processes cost retailers an average of $20 per item in handling fees, per a 2025 Forbes report. Baum’s model slashes that by cutting unnecessary stops, saving money and roughly 0.7 kg of CO₂ emissions per return, according to a 2022 Pitney Bowes study.

Read the article here: https://planitroi.com/itad/the-loading-dock-doesnt-lie-why-circular-logistics-must-start-with-the-end-in-mind