Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, which almost certainly makes it one of the biggest for waste too. So how much waste does Black Friday produce? No official body measures it.
No agency counts the event on its own. The totals that go round each November, like the claimed 1.5 million tonnes in the UK, are marketing estimates, not real measurements. The true number is impossible to pin down, because the event now spans dozens of countries and billions of orders.
What can be counted still tells the story. The Black Friday rush drives a spike in three waste streams that national data does track. Those are packaging, returns, and thrown-away clothes.
Every Black Friday, retailers report record sales. Nobody reports the waste. The extra packaging, the returns that cannot be resold, and the clothes worn once or never just turn up later in the national waste totals, which never mention Black Friday at all.
Black Friday online spending in the US year by year
Since no one measures the waste, the next best thing is to track the spending that creates it. Online sales generate the parcels, packaging and returns, and they hit a fresh record almost every year.
The figures below are for the United States, where Black Friday began and is still biggest. Adobe Analytics tracks US online sales day by day, and there is no reliable worldwide figure, so this is the clearest view of the event's growth.
| Year | US online spending on Black Friday | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $11.8 billion | +9.1% |
| 2024 | $10.8 billion | +10.2% |
| 2023 | $9.8 billion | +7.5% |
| 2022 | $9.12 billion | +2.3% |
| 2021 | $8.9 billion | -1.3% |
| 2020 | $9.0 billion | baseline |
Note: US online spending on Black Friday itself, from Adobe Analytics, with each year's reported change. Spending stands in for waste because waste is not tracked at the event level.
The 2021 dip was the first ever, as deals spread into October. Cyber Week 2024, the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, hit $41.1 billion online.
Every extra billion in sales means more boxes, bags and parcels. The waste follows the sales, it just gets counted somewhere else.
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, now the busiest shopping event of the year in much of the world. It grew from a local sale into a global, mostly online, week-long event.
- The 1950s to 1980s. Philadelphia police coined the name for the traffic chaos the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers later spun it to mean stores turning a profit, going "into the black".
- 2005. A US retail group coined Cyber Monday for the online spike the Monday after Thanksgiving.
- The 2010s. It spread to the UK, Germany, France and beyond, and stretched from one day into a full week of deals.
- Today. It is a global online event. US shoppers alone spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday 2025.
Where the Black Friday waste comes from
The waste is not one thing. It builds up across five parts of the same shopping spike, each counted on its own but never added together for Black Friday.
- Packaging and parcels. Every online order arrives in a box or bag, often with plastic fill and tape. Packaging is the biggest everyday waste stream, so a sales spike is a packaging spike.
- Returns. Discounted and online orders get sent back far more often than normal shopping, and many returns can never be sold as new again.
- Over-buying on impulse. Time-limited deals push people to buy more than they planned, including ordering several sizes or colours meaning to return some.
- Fast fashion. Clothes are a huge share of the deals, and cheap clothing has the shortest life of anything we buy, often worn only a handful of times.
- Electronics. It is the peak week for phones, TVs and gadgets, and the old devices they replace become electronic waste, the fastest-growing waste stream in the world.
The next sections put numbers on three of them, the countries, returns and clothes.
Which Black Friday countries produce the most waste
Black Friday is biggest in the United States, then the United Kingdom, Germany and France, with major sales in Brazil, Canada, Australia and across Europe.
Most are heavy waste producers before Black Friday even starts. The table shows the main markets, ranked by how much waste each person throws away in a normal year, the baseline the spike adds to.
| Country | Waste per person each year | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | about 810 kg | 2018 | US EPA |
| Denmark | 759 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Belgium | 688 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Germany | 613 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Ireland | 590 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| France | 527 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| EU average | 511 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Australia | about 510 kg | 2022 | Australia DCCEEW |
| Italy | 489 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Netherlands | 465 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Spain | 464 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Sweden | 392 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
| Brazil | about 380 kg | 2022 | Abrelpe |
| Poland | 367 kg | 2023 | Eurostat |
Note: These are total municipal waste figures, the everyday household and similar waste a country collects, not Black Friday waste on its own. The EU figures are Eurostat for 2023 and compare directly.
The United States (EPA, 2018), Australia (government waste report, 2022) and Brazil (Abrelpe, 2022) use their own national methods, so they are indicative rather than an exact ranking.
The average American throws away about 810 kilograms a year, well above the EU average of 511, before Black Friday adds anything.
The United Kingdom and Canada are two of the biggest markets of all, but each counts its waste differently, so they sit outside the table.
The UK produces about 380 kilograms of household waste per person a year, and Canada is among the world's highest, at an estimated 670 to 700 kilograms.
How big the returns problem is
Returns are where a lot of the spike turns into waste. A returned item is checked, repackaged and often shipped twice, and much of it is never resold as new. Online orders, which is how Black Friday mostly happens now, come back far more often than store purchases.
| Measure | 2024 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Total US retail returns | $890 billion | $743 billion |
| Return rate, all retail | 16.9% | 14.5% |
| Return rate, online | not published | 17.6% |
| Return rate, in store | not published | 10.02% |
Note: US retail returns from the National Retail Federation, with Appriss Retail (2023) and Happy Returns (2024). The 17.6% online rate in 2023 was well above the 10.02% in-store rate.
Returns climb higher over the holidays, with about $148 billion in holiday-season returns expected in 2023, a 15.4% rate.
Not everything sent back can go on the shelf again. Opened, damaged or out-of-season items are often liquidated, donated or thrown out. One returns company reported keeping 95.2% of its clients' returns out of landfill, a number it highlights because the norm without it is worse.
Discounts make it worse. More than half of Gen Z shoppers say they "bracket", buying several sizes or versions meaning to send back the ones they do not keep. Each extra item is another parcel, packing slip and return trip.
What happens to the clothes
Clothes are one of the biggest Black Friday categories, and the one with the worst textile waste record. Cheap clothing is made to be replaced, not repaired, and almost none is recycled into anything new.
| What happens to textiles in the EU | Per person, per year |
|---|---|
| Textile waste generated | 16 kg |
| Collected separately for reuse or recycling | 4.4 kg |
| Left in mixed household waste | 11.6 kg |
Note: European Environment Agency figures for 2020, the latest full breakdown. The 11.6 kilograms left in general waste is burned for energy or landfilled rather than reused. Worldwide, less than 1% of textiles are recycled into new products.
The waste starts before anyone buys. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that a truckload of clothing is landfilled or burned every second, and that more than half of all fast fashion is thrown away within a year.
Between 4% and 9% of the clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before it is ever worn.
Black Friday feeds this directly. Deep discounts move cheap clothing fast, and the cheaper a garment is, the sooner it tends to be thrown out.
What the numbers on electronics show
Black Friday is the peak week for phones, laptops, TVs and gadgets. Each new device usually replaces an old one, and old electronics are the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet.
The world threw out 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, and only 22.3% was formally recycled. The rest was stored, dumped or handled informally, and the total is rising five times faster than recycling can keep up.
What is being done about it
Black Friday waste is not inevitable. Some of the response is now written into law, not left to shoppers. Three things are changing.
- Producer responsibility rules. Under Extended Producer Responsibility, companies that sell packaged goods pay for collecting and recycling that packaging, which pushes the cost of all those parcels back onto sellers.
- Tighter packaging law. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation sets targets to cut packaging per person and bans some single-use formats, aimed straight at the over-packaging online orders create.
- Retailer and shopper pushback. Some brands run "Green Friday" campaigns, repairs or take-back schemes, or just tell people to buy less. How much this offsets the spike is not yet measured.
For businesses, the practical effect is that the packaging and products sold on Black Friday increasingly come with a reporting and fee obligation attached. We cover how that works across markets on the Repax blog.
We have also run this question for other big events, including the FIFA World Cup and the Tour de France.
Frequently asked questions about Black Friday waste
Below are the questions people most often ask about how much waste Black Friday produces.
How much waste does Black Friday produce each year?
No official body measures it, so any single global total, like the widely shared 1.5 million tonnes for the UK, is an estimate rather than a real measurement. What is measured is the surge in packaging, returns and thrown-away clothing that the event drives across the countries where it is biggest.
Why is there no official Black Friday waste figure?
Waste is counted by country and by material, over a whole year, not by shopping event. Nothing in the data separates a Black Friday parcel from any other parcel, so the event's total can only be estimated, never read straight off a report.
Which country produces the most Black Friday waste?
The United States is the biggest Black Friday market and also produces the most waste per person, about 810 kilograms a year. That is far above the EU average of 511 kilograms, and higher than any other big Black Friday market that reports on the same basis.
How many Black Friday purchases get returned?
Returns are highest online, which is how Black Friday now mostly happens. In 2023 the US online return rate was 17.6%, against 10.02% in stores, and holiday-season returns ran at about 15.4%. Many returned items are never resold as new.
Is fast fashion really that bad for waste?
Yes. Worldwide, less than 1% of textiles are recycled into new products, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates a truckload of clothing is landfilled or burned every second. In the EU, each person throws away about 16 kilograms of textiles a year.
Do the popular Black Friday waste stats hold up?
Often not. The "1.5 million tonnes in the UK" figure comes from a waste company's own estimate, and the "429,000 tonnes of CO2" delivery figure comes from a finance site's marketing report. Neither is backed by an official body, so we do not treat them as fact.
What is being done to cut Black Friday waste?
Producer responsibility rules make sellers pay for recycling the packaging they sell, and the EU is tightening packaging law to cut waste per person. Some retailers run repair, resale or take-back schemes, but the effect on the overall spike is not yet measured.
How does buying less actually help?
The cleanest waste is the item never made. Because so little clothing and packaging is recycled, and returns and impulse buys so often end up discarded, skipping an unneeded Black Friday purchase avoids the packaging, the delivery and the disposal all at once.
Images: DanielPenfield, Walmart
