Charity Bags

 

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.

 

  - 0 -

 

 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 'charity' collector !

• 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"  

Do you want your item of clothing to raise only  5 pence  for charity - or over  £2.50  . . . ?
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.

However, if you're unable to take your donated goods to a charity shop, some shops are happy to collect them from your house - eg British Heart Foundation (BHF)  
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