Taupō's op shops appreciate donations but no rubbish please

Taupō CARE animal rescue operations manager Helen Rabinska. Photo / David Beck

Op shops and second-hand stores have become popular methods of fundraising for charities all over New Zealand.

Those in Taupō are well supported by generous members of the community who donate goods for resale.

Unfortunately a small minority spoil it for the rest and treat some op shops as a dumping ground for rubbish.

Taupō Care animal rescue operations manager Helen Rabinska says donations are greatly appreciated but it is frustrating when people take advantage.

"It's quite demoralising really. I'll go through bags of clothes and have to throw out 70 per cent. People maybe think they can be sold but if they've got stains and rips people won't buy them. It will just sit there.

"We have items which are clearly just rubbish people want to get rid of, that's just laziness. There needs to be some education around it. We get appliances that don't work and are really dirty."

Kittens playing at the Care Animal Rescue. Photo / David Beck

Care rescues and rehomes a wide range of animals, as well as developing a more humane community through education. Helen says none of it would be possible without the money raised in the op shop.

"The op shop is essentially fundamental to our existence because we can't rescue without paying our bills.

"It gives us permanence because if we were just reliant on monetary donations then from month to month or year to year, you don't know what you'll be able to do. The shop gives us a constant flow, a baseline of money coming in.

"Our main bills are the vet bills. We've recently, unexpectedly, been faced with a huge hike in vet bills. This could alter the type and volume of rescues we do."

Rubbish and goods not worth reselling being left at the store not only don't contribute to fundraising, but they also incur an extra cost for the organisation that has to dispose of it.

"We have to pay to get rid of this stuff and it's all the additional input from volunteers who have to pick through it, load up the van and take it to the dump.

"What we really need is good to excellent quality items, to cover our vet bills especially as they have risen."

Taupō SPCA Op Shop manager Marie Smith agrees that rubbish dumped at the store has a great negative impact.

"Touch wood, it hasn't been so bad recently," she says.

"But for two years we had, every single week, a guy dumping his household rubbish outside the door under the cover of darkness.

"We get a lot of clothes that, quite frankly, you would never want to wear. We also get broken china and chipped glasses."

The Taupō SPCA Op Shop. Photo / David Beck

Marie says the store has a skip bin out the back which the SPCA pays to have emptied every week.

"We also have a lot of problems with scavenging when someone has dropped something off after hours. We'll come in the morning sometimes and there will be stuff scattered everywhere that has obviously been rummaged through.

"We are very strict with what we put in the shop, especially with clothes, we get a lot and we just don't have the space to store it. I would prefer if things were dropped off during open hours, rather than just dumped overnight."

Lake Taupō Hospice community relations manager Ross Mortimer says the main message he wants to relay to the community is how extremely grateful hospice is for all the donations it receives.

"We are really well supported by this community."

However, he did echo the others' sentiments that when rubbish and low-quality items are dumped at the store, it takes away from the charity financially and in terms of volunteer time.

Lake Taupō Hospice is a registered charity run by the Lake Taupō Hospice Trust. It provides palliative care to patients who are nearing the end of their life's journey. The money raised at the shop goes towards supplying equipment and services to terminally ill and dying people.

The Hospice Shop Taupō. Photo / David Beck

A proportion of the hospice's operating income comes from the Lakes District Health Board with the remainder from shop income and assorted donation, grant and fundraising activities.

This makes it all the more important that time and money is not wasted on sorting out other people's rubbish.