Charity shop donations: Be mindful of the deluge
After 4 months of lockdown, charity shop donations continue to rise. Businesses may be scraping around for funds, personnel, and volunteer hours, but the one thing they’re not missing is stock.
[This piece originally appeared in The Focus]
Clear-out season in the UK
We’ve all had clear-outs where we realised just how much junk we have accumulated over the years. Many of us, it seems, have had the following thought: Surely someone must be willing to take it?
The covid-19 pandemic has rendered many charity shops unable to accept donations directly. Stock has to be sanitised for a minimum of 72 hours in order to ensure it is safe to sell. This means holding vast quantities of items in storage facilities. For lack of space, shops simply cannot do this.
The inability to drop off unwanted belongings at convenience has caused consternation among righteous donators. It is apparently confusing that overworked and understaffed shop managers are not desperately grateful to receive bags of assorted and unknown clothing, used trinkets and old shoes.
The Dos & Don’ts of charity shop donations
An estimated 22 million pairs of shoes will be donated in the months after lock-down, along with 67 million items of clothing. These are unheard-of quantities. When accounting for sanitisation measures, some charity shop sorting houses will be forced to close their doors on certain days.
Without the convenience of having someone invisible sift through their heaps of unwanted belongings, some Brits are finding other routes towards peace of mind. Inconvenience leads to consternation, which evolves into frustration and impatience. Combined with laziness, this makes for grossly self-interested decision-making. Heaps of bags of ‘donations’ are being left on the street outside charity shops.
Speak to the manager of one of your local charity shops, and you will likely be given a litany of some of the more concerning ‘donations’. I have been told of one bag that, when opened, exploded with maggots. Sometimes, donation bags are deliberately mixed with regular rubbish bags.
The seemingly endless influx of donations is costing charity shops, who are forced to expend valuable volunteer — or management — hours on removing the excess. Donation bins are being used as de-facto fly-tipping areas (and treated as such by councils), and street-side donations are being disposed of, at great cost to charity shops’ manpower and volunteer hours.
The lesson to be learned
The dust will eventually settle on the point at hand. Charity shops will return to a regular cycle. However, it speaks to a larger issue. As a society, it is imperative that we address the root cause of all this excess. The issue is two-pronged.
Not only are we rampant consumers, we also, on a macro level, lack a sense of civic duty which might otherwise bind us to manage our waste more efficiently. But we do not want to take responsibility for our habit.
Waste management (as well as production) is a real problem. We cannot keep producing and buying, gathering and accumulating stuff indefinitely. It is not sustainable.
On top of this, we must stop relying on others to deal with the stuff we no longer want. If someone doesn’t want to take your old pair of shoes, perhaps that should be your problem, not theirs.
Accepting responsibility
One frustrated internet commentator writes: ‘Would I ever be rid of my stuff? Would it forever be in the back of my car?’ Perhaps, collectively, we can learn something from this.
Perhaps the urgency to be rid of stuff is telling. And maybe, rather than feeling indignant at restrictions on shop-floor fly-tipping, we should seek to reduce our rate of acquisition in the first place.
Instigating real change comes from tackling causes, not lambasting symptoms. Another online commenter bemoans the ‘I’ll mannered [sic]’ staff and states ‘the response is simple, stop donating’. Well, that’s one way to cease the outward flow of your tat. But again, it only addresses the symptom: you have too much tat, which makes you part of the waste problem.
We need to think bigger, more basic, closer to home. It might seem easier said than done, but when put into practice, it’s easy — and quite liberating. Nip it in the bud. In a word (or two): Don’t shop.
Useful checklist to read before donating/shopping.
