Salvo’s donations dumped
PILES of donations left to ruin in last week’s heavy rainfall had volunteers at Leongatha’s Salvation Army thrift shop feeling heartbroken.
Between closing time at 4.30pm on Thursday night and opening at 9am on Friday morning, donations were left scattered around the donation bins and were destroyed by the weather.
Volunteer June Calder was dismayed by the discovery.
“They’ve clearly come along with a large trailer full of items and just dumped it at the back of our store. Nothing was put in the donation bins,” she said.
“It looks disgusting and it’s heartbreaking because the majority of it will now go to the tip. A lot of it looks like it would’ve been a really nice donation.
“It’s not a donation anymore. It’s rubbish we will have to haul to the tip. We will salvage what we can but it isn’t looking good.”
Ms Calder said one of the donation bins was 70 per cent empty, while the other was completely empty at the time of the dumping.
Although she is not worried about the cost of taking the rubbish to the transfer station, Ms Calder was unhappy about calling in extra volunteers to dedicate their time to clean the area.
“We have a volunteer who comes in and takes rubbish to the tip, but he lives on the other side of Inverloch and would usually come here Tuesdays. We can’t leave it here, so it has to be cleaned and removed immediately, which will take us a couple of hours at least,” she said.
“We don’t have the facilities needed to properly clean donations that have been left outside. We pride ourselves on providing good quality items in our store so most of this will have to be thrown away.
“Just because people are going through a hard time right now, it doesn’t mean they deserve dirty and damaged things.”
What a mess: Leongatha’s Salvation Army thrift shop volunteer Helen Clapton was disheartened to find potential donations dumped at the back of the store on Friday morning. Most of the items were damaged in the wet weather.
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Posted by Tayla Kershaw on Jun 28 2016. Filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
