Thrift stores need your donations, not your junk | Green Matters: Reducing, reusing and recycling | Idaho Statesman
It's yard sale season, and at the end of every summer weekend - and despite the "No dumping please" sign - the lot outside the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on Broadway tends to become an informal depository for all the stuff that didn't sell in neighborhood rummage sales.
By Monday morning, said store manager Loretta Broussard, the piles are high. Some of it can be sold in the store to support St. Vincent de Paul's programs, which include Thanksgiving baskets, prescription drug assistance and the emergency help line for the needy.
But too much of the time the piles are filled with things that no one can use, or would want to: old tires, smelly clothes, couches with mystery stains.
Last year, in addition to the time and gas money spent by employees to haul items to the landfill, St. Vincent's three area stores paid a total of $20,000 in dump fees to dispose of unusable items donated by the public, said Broussard.
The story is the same at the Idaho Youth Ranch. The organization, which provides residential care for young people in crisis as well as support services for families, spent $300,000 in 2009 to dispose of unusable items left at its 32 stores throughout Idaho.
The money spent on dump fees is the equivalent of 1,500 days of residential care in Youth Ranch facilities, said Roberta Rene, director of development.
"Bottom line, it's about educating the donor, getting people to ask themselves, 'Would I buy this?' " said Rene. "The Tupperware that's been scorched in the microwave with the red sauce - it cannot be resold."
Donors should give only items that are "shelf ready" - or "floor ready" in the case of furniture.
In most cases, organizations don't have the resources to repair items like appliances. "Even if all it needs is a $5 part. We can't afford to pay someone $8 an hour to fix it, then sell it at a thrift store price," Broussard said.
Rene and Broussard want to get the word out that Allied Waste (345-1266) will pick up large trash items in Boise for free.
Johna Dorcheus, assistant manager at the Good Samaritan Store in Boise, said she thinks some donors' emotions get in the way when they're deciding what to donate. They may not see a favorite chair as beyond its prime, a favorite shirt as threadbare. They can't stand to throw items away, even when they should.
The Good Samaritan Store supports the Good Samaritan Home, an independent living facility that operates on a sliding-scale fee. The store prides itself on its ingenuity: a plan to use unusable old tires as flower planters, enlisting volunteers who are working off community service hours to cut worn all-cotton items into rags that a local sign company buys for 50 cents a pound.
But Dorcheus' agency must contend with the same unsellable broken furniture and obsolete computer parts as other thrift stores do, and relies on board members to haul it all away when they can.
Donors have even tried to leave live animals at the store: a chicken, two rabbits, a pet bird and a rooster at last count.
"People assume we'll take anything," Dorcheus said.
Anna Webb: 377-6431
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