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“It’s not all good, but there is a lot of good.” says Mike Rolton Hamilton’s St Vincent de Paul manager.
It appears that while a few don’t know the difference between a landfill and a charity Op Shop, the Vinnies in Hamilton say the good outweighs the bad by a country mile.
Last month TVNZ ran an episode of their documentary series Gutsful about dumping rubbish on OP Shops.
The promo said “We uncover some un-charitable dumping in the Waikato, where Hospice donations have gone to the dogs.”
“Mike from St Vinnies has had a gutsful of sorting through sex toys and soiled goods.”
But Rolton told the Waikato Times “The really good stuff that people know we can recycle, that’s 99 per cent of it.”
“We don’t get a big pile of useless things, we get the occasional useless thing,”
The Hamilton St Vincent de Paul FaceBook page gives a good picture of the scope and variety of the things that people are doing to support the Society’s works.
The Vinnies in Hamilton provide food parcels for families, school lunches for students and run a soup kitchen two nights a week.
“For just food alone, if you want a number, we feed everyone in Hamilton city once a year, and that’s growing. Rolton said.
“On a dollar value, we put out $15,000 of food into the community every week.”
“Our shops are basically our fundraisers because we don’t get Government funding, so we have to survive on our own money.”
Others, is seems are not so fortunate. Earlier this year the Manawatu Standard ran a piece about the Methodist Social Services Goodwill.
Manager Lyal Brenton told the Standard that that the accumulated junk left outside the city’s charity op-shops was estimated to cost the sector $70,000 a year in disposal fees.
Source
- stuff.co.nz
- stuff.co.nz
- Image: stuff.co.nz
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