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Canberra’s biggest charities dumped almost 600 tonnes of waste last financial year, with the declining quality of donations a key factor in goods ending up as landfill. Source: ABC News .
The St Vincent de Paul Society sent more waste to ACT Government landfill sites than any other charity in Canberra, disposing of 376 tonnes of donated goods.
The figure marks an increase of 67 tonnes from the previous year, when the organisation sent 309 tonnes to landfill under a scheme that waives tip fees for charities, according to a document released under Freedom of Information laws.
St Vincent de Paul director of commercial operations in Canberra and Goulburn, Lindsay Rae, said the rise reflected a pattern of wastefulness the organisation had seen over the past five years.
“We’ve had this natural progression [of waste], especially since COVID, of about 15 to 20 per cent a year,” Mr Rae said.
“Unfortunately, the quality of stuff that we’re buying these days just doesn’t last, and so when we get the donations, a much higher percentage of it ends up going to landfill. There are a lot of things that are broken.”
Most of Vinnies’ waste does not come from clothing, but from bulky, broken or incomplete homewares and packaging.
“People immediately think about textiles when they think about what we have to dump, but the reality is it’s not textiles that are creating the problem,” Mr Rae said. “Only 2 per cent of our waste is actually textiles, the rest is homewares.
“We need good homewares that are complete, that aren’t broken. “That’s what we need more than anything else.”
The majority of Vinnies’ landfill comes from its Canberra warehouse, which processes items that its 10 retail stores are unable to sort through.
Mr Rae said the warehouse cost $3.4 million to operate each year, covering the work of 45 employees who sorted and processed about 2.8 million kilograms of overflow donations.
But he would love to see that money put towards services, rather than processing goods.
“When we receive a bag of donations, we don’t know what’s in it,” Mr Rae said.
“A large percentage of it is stuff that we don’t need … and it’s costing us millions of dollars. “It is actually costing someone a meal.”
Vinnies sends most charity waste to ACT landfill as overall disposal decline (By Lily Nothling and Lois Maskiell, ABC News )
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