Pre-Sort Your Donations Before Thrift Stores Reopen
If your coping with boredom during the first few weeks of shelter involved a serious effort to chill out, you know what the last weeks have meant: staring at the piles of all your clean-up donations lying around your house, waiting to resume work. thrift stores and donation centers.
But when these all-donation centers still open, there is still a lot of work to sort, and social distancing measures and other arrangements may mean that staff and volunteers will take more time to deliver the goods to the shop floor.
While you might not want to wait another month or two to send your donations, there is a small action you can take to make life easier for your chosen donation center, once you do: Pre-sort your items.
You don’t have to be meticulous. But put household items and hard items in one box or bag and soft items like curtains and clothes in another container. While you’re at it, sort things out that you know won’t be resold.
Typically when donating items to nonprofits, you want to consider the Golden Rule: Donate only items that are in good enough condition that you want to buy them yourself.
While you should definitely remove dirty and unsanitary items from your donation basket and follow store-specific donation instructions, you can dispose of some damaged fabric items at your thrift store.
Take Goodwill Industries International as an example: In 2019 alone, Goodwill diverted nearly £ 4 billion in donated goods from landfills, an official told me this week.
These billions of pounds can come from a wide variety of sources. Items remain on the sales floor for a specified amount of time before being handed over to the Goodwill outlet for sale per pound. The items that remain after they’ve been in the store are then often sold in bundles to a wholesale reseller or recycler who turns them into insulation, rags, or other material.
But at the initial stage of sorting, not everything ends up in the trading floor. Some items are immediately sent for recycling or wholesale.
Let’s say, for example, you donate a set of sheets. They are clean, no tears or stains, but the elastic on the sheet is damaged. These sheets are likely to be recycled immediately.
Now imagine that you are looking through your donation pile and remember the reason why you wanted to get rid of those sheets – this trashy elastic band. You may be able to cut open the sheets to use for cleaning the house, but honestly, you may not need a whole sheet rag.
But if you mark them for recycling and separate them from the rest of your donations, they are likely to be recycled and given new life in a different form. In doing so, you can help speed up the sorting process at your local warehouse.
If you are unsure if your donation center accepts recycled items and it is not listed on its website, finding out is as easy as calling and asking, “Do you accept textiles for recycling?” Chances are good that the answer is yes.