It’s Monday morning.  I’m on my way in to town in the ute to do a few jobs before I grab a metric ton of gravel for the driveway.  One of the jobs I’m doing is to drop off some unneeded clothing in the Salvo bins.  5 bags of maternity clothes that my wife has washed, sorted, folded and properly bagged up to donate.

 

I drive in to town and head to the carpark where the donation bins are located.  Only one problem…

… I can’t get near them for all the crap that has been dumped!

 

Two busted TV’s, a bunch of broken furniture and not one, not two but THREE mattresses have been piled around the bins.  From the smell wafting from them, I’m guessing the beds previous occupants were either some of the druggies down the road or else they had been used for a year by a herd of incontinent sheep (odd how they both give off the same aroma).

 

I managed to wade through all this stuff and put my bags into the bins.  It’s then I notice this sign:

Note that the sign even specifically says ‘no mattresses’ yet there were three of them!  Which means one of two things, either the people who dumped them couldn’t read (a distinct possibility) or they were feral f*ckheads who didn’t give a shit!

When I returned later in the day, I noticed that all the rubbish had been removed.  Turns out it doesn’t matter if you can’t read because they have even bigger signs with pictures:

Why do people do it?  Oh I get the basic reasoning – it’s easy and its free.  But why there?  There are skip bins next to supermarkets and shopping center’s which usually don’t have cameras on them.  There are back alleys and overgrown scrub areas.  But nope, for some reason like a magnet these idiots are always drawn to dump their stuff next to charity shop bins.  Why?  Do they like to pretend that even though this stuff is specifically not wanted, that somehow the charity shop will find a use for it anyway and therefore they really are doing a good deed?  That’s an impressive level of self-delusion if so.  Lets face it – have any of you ever gone into a charity shop and seen mattresses for sale?  Ever?  I know I haven’t!

Is it simply the word ‘bin’? The noun being ‘a receptacle in which to deposit rubbish’.  Do they think a bin is a bin is a bin so you can dump whatever crap you like in and around them because that is what bins are for?

 

I’m not sure what their reasoning is and frankly I don’t care!  It’s disgusting behavior and totally lacking in social conscience!  The bins that I saw on Monday morning were less than a five minute drive from the local tip and the tip doesn’t charge that much.  A growing number of councils across the country are introducing ‘free hard rubbish collection days’.  Either as one predesignated day each year or individual pick-ups for households that you can get once or twice a year.  The point is it’s not hard to get rid of this stuff without making a charity to it for you – to their own cost I might add!

 

That’s right – it actually costs the charities to get rid of this stuff!  The council doesn’t do it for them for free, they have to do it themselves.  That means paying employees and using vehicles to go collect all that crap and then take it to dump where they have to pay a fee to dump it off.  So dumping your old mattresses there is not only not helping the charities, it is actively hurting them.  This just up’s the level of bastardry of this action in my opinion.

 

I’d like to quote one of my cousins who lives in the ACT, who chimed in on this subject:

“One of my old jobs involved emptying those bins and aside from all the unwanted goods we (a charity!) were paying to take to the rubbish tip we also had to deal with broken glass and bags of soiled nappies, garbage etc, and occasionally came across people trying to steal from the bins!”

 

So now we have people not even pretending that they are doing a good deed?  Soiled nappies?  Yeah, the poor really need those. People stealing from the bins?!?  My gods!  These charities charge basically nothing for the goods they receive and then sell on.  So stealing from them is essentially the same as stealing from the poor themselves.  I mean – for f*cks sake!

 

So next time I see one of these social parasites acting in this manner I’m going to take action!  Photo’s on the phone and straight to the cops it is!  I’d suggest you all do the same.  I’d say we should all do the super hero thing and confront the villain’s head on, but the kind of people that do this are probably the same people that wouldn’t think twice about sticking their used syringe in your eye.  Then it will be you in need of the charities help and they have enough to deal with already.

 

And for anyone that is reading this blog who uses the Charity Bins as their personal dumping ground.  Don’t. Just Don’t.  Got it? Alright?  Fine!

 

Got something to add, would love to read it in the comments section below.