Charity shops nowadays rely almost entirely on donations from the public - but are some of these donations causing more trouble than they’re worth?

 

Have you ever donated something to a charity shop? Old toys, clothes that don’t fit, maybe some books? To most, this would seem like a far better option than simply throwing them away - however, it seems this isn’t always the case. I spoke to Emma, who volunteers through her office at a number of different hospices and charity shops, and she told me about what she found when she was working.

 

Almost everything in a charity shop is donated, and the staff are comprised of mostly volunteers. Emma told me that one hospice she worked with relied on raising £1.2 million per year from their charity shops in order to keep them in business - a huge amount of work for such a small number of people. 

 

Emma’s volunteer work entails a number of duties, one of these being to visit the warehouses of these charities and sort through the donations: what can or can’t be sold, where it goes, etc. She explained how she was ‘horrified’ when she arrived to help them out; she estimated there were 5000 sacks of items, and added that the building ‘felt like a landfill site’. Alongside her team of around 45, they only managed to clear a pile or two – but on an average day, there would be just one or two people to try and clear the load, an ‘impossible task’.

 

But something that made her task even more difficult was the sheer number of items that were simply unsellable. ‘Soiled, stained, ripped – the stuff just wasn’t reusable’, she noted. ‘People are using charity shops like dumping grounds, so they don’t have to get rid of things themselves’. The volunteers are already stretched thin, not enough people running shops and sorting/distributing donations, so when they must sort through thousands of items and go to the extra trouble of disposing of the unusable in a safe way, it becomes hopeless. 

 

This isn’t to say to stop donating to charity altogether – without people’s contributions, they couldn’t stay open. But, perhaps to really think beforehand; if something is tattered and ripped well beyond repair, get rid of that yourself.