Every week, hundreds of tonnes of donations are thrown away. I stepped in to reap the rewards and investigate the problem.
Dumpster diving: the act of salvaging unwanted items from bins in the grimy, untrodden alleyways behind businesses. It’s not exactly the glamorous way I thought I’d be spending my 20s, but regardless, here I am, hooked on the hobby. I find myself craving weekly bin loads that shops throw away, blind to the dirt of it all.
Specifically, the bins behind charity shops do it for me. All manner of shops are popular in the dumpster diving community: commercial shops, retail parks, tech stores, supermarkets; you name it. What sets diving at charity shops apart is that you can find anything in their bins, all, hopefully, to sell for a profit.
Every Thursday at 11:30 pm, just before the bins get emptied, my friends and I arm ourselves with hi-viz jackets – to hopefully look like we’re meant to be there – and catch the last bus up to a string of charity shops in a neighbouring high-end area; better donations mean better ‘rubbish’.
Walking through the backstreets at night, spurred on by the potential of what I could find, is oddly peaceful; the only disturbance to the silence is the wheels on our cart rattling on the old cobbled streets.
Even having done this for a while, I’m always shocked by what I find, as I was on a particularly icy November evening. Opening a bin behind a charity bookshop revealed a mountain of CDs and DVDs, from Bowie to Beyonce, Blade Runner to Bambi.
Many of them were brand new, still sealed in their wrapping. It’s fascinating that things can be made in a factory, sold on a shelf, donated to a shop, and then thrown in a bin, all without ever being opened, and it speaks to our larger relationship with over-consumption.
As we went from bin to bin, the cart filled up with goodies, and we became increasingly shocked by what we found – tennis rackets, collectable plushies, books, and art prints – all donated in the goodwill of collecting money for charity, but which ultimately were destined for landfill.
While it is an effort, and consistently ruins my sleep schedule, I feel as though I’ve taken on a bit of a burden that I can’t ignore with dumpster diving. Missing a week haunts me; the thought that what is waiting out there, without me, will end up being wasted.
I’ve also come to rely on the hobby as a source of secondary income, selling unwanted items on eBay; there is no profit margin on things you find for free. On just this three-hour weekly route, I have never walked away with items totalling less than £200, easily beating a minimum wage job’s salary. Maybe the dream of living on a journalist’s wage in London is less far-fetched than I imagined.
But why so much waste?
I’m yet to address the elephant in the room: why do charity shops throw so much away? Naturally, they’re looking to maximise their profits, and surely wouldn’t throw away anything that might sell.
Well, if you’ve ever poked your head into the backrooms of one, you may already know the answer: space.
Charity shops deal with an unimaginable number of donations through their doors and left at their doorsteps, and it’s simply not feasible for most to keep storing it all.
The fact that giant bins are filled with donations every week speaks to just how much is donated, which is, in their eyes, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. This, combined with a decline in the quality of donations over the past few years, means charity shops have learned to be ruthless.
As BBC Bristol reported, charity shops feel as though they are “being used as the ‘middle man’ for waste,” conscience-free dumping sites for unwanted items. More stained clothes and unusable appliances flooding the space mean volunteers who sort through donations have to be cutthroat to keep up with their overcrowded rooms.
Patrick*, a charity shop manager in London, tells me that “80-90% of donations that come through our doors are unsellable,” for various reasons.
“I refuse to sell Shein,” he tells me, as lots of it is polyester, stains easily, tears easily, and won’t make much for the shop if priced fairly; “we need to cover targets so we can pay rents and business rates.”
There are answers for lots of electronic items which are chucked away, too. “We don’t accept electrical stuff from the donors as we can’t PAT test them in-store, the health and safety components and the operation of the item. If something is faulty and causes damage to someone or their property, the charity shop could be sued.”
More for me, I suppose – a few weeks ago I found a working vintage clock worth £125.
Clothing is strangely scarce in the bins I search weekly, despite it being one of the main things sold in charity shops. In the UK, we have rag companies who take unwanted clothes to sell elsewhere on a bigger scale – they are sorted into serviceable and unserviceable donations, with the latter being turned into other textiles – namely carpet, mop heads, and of course, rags.
The scale of these operations is enormous. As Royal Trinity Hospice reports, “every week, East London Textiles collects over 200 tonnes of used clothing from charity retailers across the south of the UK, plus an additional 100 tonnes in bric-a-brac and other non-fashion items.”
Again, however, the quality of received donations at charity shops is affecting the system. As Patrick says: “More rag companies refuse to collect all the unsellable stuff,” especially that made of polyester and nylon fabrics.
Old systems are becoming outdated, and we can’t keep up with the sheer amount of products that we’re buying. “We don’t have the technology in the UK to use the piles of polyester that people discard from buying so much fast fashion.”
“Every week, East London Textiles collects over 200 tonnes of used clothing from charity retailers across the south of the UK, plus an additional 100 tonnes in bric-a-brac and other non-fashion items.”
Royal trinity hospice
Other countries have learned to deal with the waste in different ways. France, for example, “now has a system to use unsellable fabrics and make bricks to build homes.”
Others simply don’t have the same consumerist culture that we do, which leads to all the waste in the first place. Patrick tells me that “In countries like Japan, it is part of the culture to reuse the cloth of the garments not used anymore to make cloths to clean, filler for pillows or mend and repair;” nothing is deemed ‘unuseable’.
He thinks things should work differently here; in the meantime, while we are creating so much excess, he believes that: “Things should be as in continental Europe. In Spain, there are places where people can take free stuff if they have to find outfits for job interviews, for example. If we have a type of exchange system where people give something in exchange for what they need, maybe it will be more fair and sustainable. The issue in the UK is that crazy shopping obsession for everything new.”
Patrick was more than up for talking to me, even giving me some recommendations on where to dumpster dive in London. Despite its grey area legality, dumpster diving is generally looked on positively by charity shops. They don’t want to waste, but feel they have no choice but to. If dumpster divers can step in as third parties, it’s a win-win.
Is there an answer?
However, dumpster divers don’t always have a good reputation. Emily Cronin, the Retail Transformation Manager at North London Hospice, a charity shop chain that operates over 18 charity shops in the city, showed me a photo of the aftermath of another dumpster diver’s visit to their bins. The bins’ lock was broken, its contents of toys and games gouged out, scattered all around the floor below it.
“The charity pays for a locked bin, as we pay for council waste management. A person has broken the lock on the bin and gone through the items in the bin. We will now have to pay for a new lock and clear up the mess left behind,” she explained.
This is after they’ve spent the time to sort through mountains of donations. She was kind enough to invite me to North London Hospice’s High Barnet branch, one of their biggest shops, to see the state of things first-hand.
“The volume of stuff that we’re seeing within charity, whether low or high quality, is phenomenal at the moment. I’ve never seen so much. We get parts of cars, photocopiers, you name it, we get it dumped on us. And it’s up to the charity to deal with other people’s items that they don’t want.”
Walking into the storage floor at High Barnet, it was clear; their facility is massive, yet packed to the brim with all manner of things.
“I’ve had people before turn up with a chair, saying ‘I was on the way to the dump, but I thought you might want this ‘. I said try sitting on the chair, and they couldn’t. Who do you think here is going to do up the chair? And if you asked someone to look through their donations, they’d run a mile.”
Fly tipping is a big issue for charity shops too. “Every morning, there is fly tipping. People have done house clearances and dumped them on the doorstep when it’s raining. And then what do we do? We have to phone the council. It’s a considerable cost when things aren’t donated properly,” Emily said.
“If you asked someone to look through their donations, they’d run a mile.”
Emily cronin
“We don’t produce the waste, the donors who are donating should be donating clean, sellable items”.
It seems that North London Hospice, and charity shops in general, spend half their time dealing with waste, which they could be using to sell more and make more money for their charities.
They are trying their best with the resources they have. At NLH, CDs that take too long to sell in-store and take up floor space are donated to Revive Innovations, a design company which repurposes CDs into furniture material. It’s not ideal, but much better than them going to landfill.
Their team was also clearly too small to deal with it all – just the shop manager, eBay manager, and two volunteers on the day I made the trek up.
Different volunteers have different expertise, Emily tells me, which leads to some items slipping through the cracks and ending up in the bin. Volunteers tend to be older, so it’s also a generational problem.
“The volunteers won’t know if, say, a Bape top came in. They wouldn’t know what it was, and it’ll go into the waste. Or if it’s got a stain on or a button missing. And that will just go. They won’t understand the value of the item, or they’re quite specific with what their own taste is.”
A prime example of this happened to me just a few weeks ago when I found a sealed Nintendo Switch game, which an elderly volunteer may not have recognised. I listed and sold it on eBay for £40 within a day.
My success with selling found items has come from Google Lens, an AI-powered app that will scour an image for similar ones or an image that has the same item in it.
It’s incredibly useful for searching through what I find to see what is worth selling. I don’t need to be a pottery expert to know that a vase I found is antique, or, likewise, a video game expert to know that a Switch game is worth selling.
The one issue with dumpster diving is that my house has ended up just as cramped as the charity shop backrooms. Some stuff that they throw away actually isn’t any good to sell, and ends up sitting in my house for months on end; it’s the price I pay for everything that does sell.
I sympathise with charity shops, as sometimes I don’t have a choice but to throw away what is clogging up my hallway, or re-donate it back into the charity shop cycle and give it another chance.
Emily does admit that things make it through the system and into the bins that shouldn’t. “If I look through items right before they go, I open up the bags and go ‘oh my gosh that shirt’s decent’. Why are we not selling these?”
They take a lot of steps to try to avoid this happening, with experts coming in for different items, to look at silverware, stamps, antiques, etc., but there’s only so much that can be done with a limited space, working against the clock before the next slew of items comes through the door.
I’m invited to smell a bag of donated clothes on my way out of the High Barnet NLH branch; a strong waft of urine is my final reminder that the donations they receive are not up to scratch.
They should be just that – donations – quickly sellable items that other people want. “Unfortunately, charities have to deal with what isn’t sold. North London Hospice spent a considerable amount of money getting rid of people’s waste. It’s so lovely when something comes in that’s folded, been washed – it can just be steamed and hung up.” As a country, we simply buy too much for ourselves, for each other, and have to get rid of the ‘old’.
I do understand that, as Emily says, charity shops don’t produce the waste, and it’s a larger issue with our society and how we use the shops, though I can’t kick this feeling that there’s a cog missing in the machine, that there’s got to be a way to prevent so much going to landfill.
I am staggered every week by the amount I find in the handful of charity shops I check – my mind can’t even comprehend how much must be binned across the country.
Giving things away for free or re-donating to different places raises their own set of problems. If an item is donated, it’s done so with the expectation of the donor that their item will raise money for their charity, not be given away.
Re-donating to schools, or homeless shelters, for instance, is tricky as institutions will request very specific items and require vetting. School books or toys must be free of profanity and clean, sleeping bags for homeless shelters must be checked for fleas and mites, all taking time away from either the charity shops or the institutions receiving their donations.
“We need £16 million a year to run the hospice. And £5.5 million of that comes from retail.” It’s a large operation, but I think the solution would be reinvestment – into hiring expert staff with tech skills, or more storage to sell online; though this isn’t a burden that charity shops themselves should have to carry.
“It’s because people in this country overconsume.”
All images by Isaac Hodgson unless otherwise specified.
*Name changed at the request of the interviewee