Well, I’m glad you asked. Items such as bric-a-brac that have been deemed unsellable may be discarded. In Long Beach, there are 3 trash cans in the production area. Items may be discarded in these trash cans. Once full, they may be thrown into our back dumpster. In order to avoid injury or avoid a potential spill, please double bag bags that contain glass, ceramic, or sharp plastic pieces. Avoid overfilling bags, remember they still have to make into the dumpster, the last thing we want is someone getting hurt trying to “he-man” a bag over their shoulder into the dumpster.
Now on to clothing. Believe it or not, those BBQ-stained Abercrombie shirts and ripped Dockers have some use. As opposed to throwing the items away, we recycle them. Seeing as we don’t have the bandwidth to wash or repair garments, we have other people come and pick them up who may have the time to do just that. We place the soiled garments into trash cans just as we would unsellable bric-a-brac except instead of throwing the items away, we store them and they are picked up by our wonderful drivers. From there, they are stored at the warehouse until they are picked up by another agency.
In Long Beach, we have the benefit of having a rather large staging area for furniture we deem unsellable or furniture pieces that have made it through their respective cycles. Furniture pieces can be large and cumbersome and we must remember that we share the back area with the wonderful store next to us. With that in mind, we must make use of this are and its space efficiently. For those of you who like Tetris, think of staging our larger pieces like a giant game of Tetris. Items should be tucked into the corner in a way that conserves the most space and makes it easy on our drivers to pick up to discard on Tuesday’s. Optics are also very important. We don’t want donors to show up to donate items have it look like a junk yard back there; they are less likely to donate in the future if it looks like we don’t care about what’s being donated.