Photo: BBC |
Almost daily we have a 'charity' bag or leaflet pushed through the letter box. Most boast of their giving to a registered charity which benefits by around £50 per tonne of clothes collected. What is not said is that a tonne of clothing is sold for £1,000. There is also a thriving 'business' in lifting bags left out for others as illustrated above.
If you have clothes or other items for disposal, please take them to a charity shop. Some will collect if too much to carry. Below are some interesting facts from http://www.charitybags.org.uk/
Next time you receive a plastic bag to fill, check the small print first or go to the above web site.
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How to stop a bogus house-to-house collection...
. . . You need to act quickly - see the hands-on guide below
Charity shops raise 50 times more than house-to-house collections . . .
Taking your unwanted clothes etc to a charity shop raises around 50 times more money for charity compared with giving your clothes to a typical- House-to-house collectors: Most of these are commercial companies - who give the partner charity only £50 or so for each tonne of clothes collected.
That's only 5 pence per kilogram (35 ounces) - that's the weight of a jacket or winter dress.
[There's a thousand kilograms in a tonne.]
Usually the company exports your clothes (especially to Eastern Europe - eg Lithuania) and they're sold for private profit. The company sells the clothes for over £1,000 per tonne. - Charity shops: By contrast, if you take the same item of clothing to a charity shop they'll sell it for around £10, of which over £2.50 is profit (=net proceeds) for the charity. Also, you can increase this by 25% by using "Gift Aid"
Worse still, around 50% of house-to-house collections are misleading/bogus/illegal.
... And fewer than 1 in 10,000 (=0.01%) illegal collections is prosecuted.
... And over 10% of filled bags are stolen before the house-to-house collector arrives.
With CDs and DVDs, around 200 times more money is raised for charity by charity shops compared with typical house-to-house collections (10 cased CDs weigh 1 kilogram) :
A house-to-house collector gives only a half-penny (0.5p) per CD to the charity !
A charity shop makes almost £1 profit (=net proceeds) per donated CD or DVD
With jewellery, over 1,000 times more money is raised for charity by charity shops compared with typical (royalty-per-tonne) house-to-house collections.
There are over 9,000 charity shops in the UK - including :
- Age UK, Barnardo's, British Red Cross, Cancer Research UK, Children's Society, Extra Care, FARA, Marie Curie, Oxfam, RSPCA, Salvation Army, Scope, Shelter, Sue Ryder, YMCA; local cancer hospices.
For more information on how charity shops raise 50 times more than collections, see the following :
the Charity shops versus house-to-house collections page
the Statistics page
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