to be annoyed that the charity shop at the end of our road has started locking their bin?

[SpawnChorus]

I live a few doors down from a charity shop, and have often seen people rummaging in their bin. I used to (vaguely) think, "Oh poor things...good luck to them," until a few months ago when I happened to see a lot of perfectly good stuff in the bin.

I asked one of the charity shop staff about it and they said I was welcome to take anything I wanted, so I did. I came away with some great toys - perfect working order, not grubby or in any way broken, and with working batteries (apart from a pair of walkie talkies which someone had actually gone to the trouble of taping together and labelling which one needed a new battery). My DCs were thrilled and have had a lot of play time with these things.

I now feel obliged to have a peek in the bin every now and then, and more often than not there are perfectly good things just being thrown away . If it's something I know we will use, I'll usually take it.

Anyway while I was having a look today, one of the staff came out to lock the bin! I explained that I was going to take some of the children's books and videos that were going to otherwise be carted off to landfill, and he said that the neighbours had been complaing about people rifling through the bins and that Environmental Health were "on their case".

I asked him if he thought it was right that perfectly good donated items were going to waste, and asked if they could maybe arrange for the stuff to be taken to a refuge, or at least have some sort of formal system in which people are invited to take items from a designated box for free (NB the shop keeps a lot of its stock on the pavement, so it's not as if this would "change the character of the street" in anyway). He was v dismissive and brushed me off.

So, what can be done about this?? I just think it's SO WRONG that good quality donated items which are in excellent condition are being sent to landfill. It's all the more baffling whern they are trying to sell boxes of tatty toys (naked Barbies with chopped off hair anyone?)

I have donated to this shop in the past, but there's no way I will any more. I would be so pissed off to think that my donated stuff was being binned when I know I could give it away to appreciative friends and family.

I used to work in a charity shop (large well known one)

We used to throw out LOADS! The van would come in the morning full of bags of donations (the ones that have been posted through your door at home and you've filled and left on the kerb for collection). The manager would say "right we need womens tops today" and we'd chuck everything else. Perfectly good clothes, clean, good condition etc. I used to take some stuff home but couldnt "save" it all.

To be fair clothes did go to "rag man" which got sold for a small amount per kg. But we could easily have taken the overstock down to the other charity shops in the high street to sell.

Very sad. I will never donate to those large chain shops again. Choose the small ones.

Yellowed books/tatty ones/old text books etc get sent to recycling.

All ripped/tatty/marked clothing gets sent on as rags.

Toys without CE marks have to dumped.

Trust me charity shops don't like getting rid of stuff as we have to pay for our rubbish collections.

We can't sell videos - no-one buys them anymore and they take up valuable space for stuff we can sell.

We storage our rubbish indoors until bin day so we don't get rubbish raiders.

Despite having a big notice - saying don't leave stuff when the shop is closed - we had to climb over a huge pile of stuff on Monday - leftovers from bootsales - tbh most of it was crap including half eaten burgers!! Nice.

I do understand that the charity shops have to get rid of stuff that they're not allowed / don't want to sell, but it seems like utterly mad wastefulness to just bin it. That's the bit I'm objecting to really. I am absolutely certain the stuff would disappear within hours, nay minutes if they displayed it in a "for free" box. Instead it's getting junked and will rot in a landfill site for god knows how many thousands of years. It's appalling IMO.

charleneanne - the bin rummagers I've seen have generally been young studenty types. And I'm a perfectly respectable looking woman . But even if the bins were being raided by tramps, surely that's preferable to just junking the stuff?

Charleneanne