Sunday 1 August 2010

Charity clothes bags

I am a fairly trusting person, naive I am sure. But I am getting more and more concerned about the number of "charity" clothing bags being deposited on my doorstep, sometimes as many as 2 a day. For 2 weeks I kept a pile of them and today have had a count up. 15. Now like most women I am sure I have far too many clothes. My wardrobe contains things that I have never worn, or only worn once or twice. Some of the things do not fit, and some went out of fashion in Queen Victoria's reign. BUT I do not have enough to fill all of these bags. Another worry has been the number of charity scams going round. So today I put them all through the computer and discovered 5 of them are reported scams. That is 1/3rd of them, even I was surprised.

Now I have the problem what to do with all these sheets of paper and plastic sacks - I am sure I should tear the sacks into strips and knit ecologically sound bags with them, but I just do not have the time right now. So all the sheets of paper are going in my blue recycle bin, and I am going to use the plastic sacks to put put rubbish in when I clean out the rabbits.

It is such a shame that the legitimate charities spend so much money producing these items, but never collect the unused ones - I have 3 from the NSPCC. How many hundreds of thousands of these were produced, and at what cost? Surely it would have been better to use that money helping out the children they say they are collecting for.

And what do I do with my unwanted clothes? Anything of good quality goes to my local charity shops. All the rest is taken to my local tip for recycling.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Very good Paula, I wrote to our local paper about the amount of bags that come through my door. Allas the letter did NOT get published.

John