This startup helps enterprising resellers prevent nearly a million pounds of returns from ending up in landfills

"Americans are likely to have spent a record $1 trillion-plus this holiday shopping season alone, and about $5.5 trillion in retail sales in all of 2025, according to estimates by the National Retail Federation. That includes many unhappy returns for retailers: And when it comes back to them, a lot of the $850 billion in returned merchandise is often cheaper to discard than to inspect, sort, and resell-adding millions of tons to landfills every year."

""This is a massive ecological problem, as well as a financial problem for these companies," says Ryan Ryker, CEO of rScan. Based in South Bend, Indiana, the startup has developed software and logistics services to help transfer these products from the beleaguered original sellers to resellers more eager to do the work of making money on a returned product. "There's a lot of people who are looking to make side cash," says cofounder and chief logistics officer Julian Marquez about their small-business clients."

"Instead of getting, say, a shipping pallet of all the same product, such as a power tool, resellers have to sort through a mishmash that can contain dozens of different items-including many one-offs. rScan's offering for them sounds simple: a barcode-scanning app. But behind that is an entire data infrastructure to help resellers understand what they've got and how to sell it. Scanning the UPC barcode on a box pulls up the item's product name and brand, images, detailed descriptions, and manuals."

Americans spent more than $1 trillion over the holiday season and retail sales may reach about $5.5 trillion in 2025, with $850 billion in returns. Much returned merchandise is cheaper for retailers to discard than to process, creating millions of tons of landfill waste and financial losses. rScan, based in South Bend, Indiana, offers software and logistics to redirect returned goods to resellers. A barcode-scanning app links UPCs to product names, brands, images, descriptions, and manuals. The platform helps resellers assess condition, populate marketplace listing attributes, and estimate prices by scraping marketplace data, enabling resale and waste reduction.

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