Tauranga rubbish remover donating kerbside items, charity makes plea for donations

Junk Boss owner Alex Fladgate has been donating used items back to the community.

The sight of “perfectly good stuff” being sent to the dump has spurred a Tauranga rubbish removal business owner to start collecting it and giving it away.

It comes as a local charity shop chain reports the cost-of-living crisis has left it at “crisis point” with donations lacking and high customer demand for affordable goods.

Junk Boss owner Alex Fladgate said he started his rubbish pick-up service six months ago and noticed a lot of “good stuff getting thrown away”.

Beds, chests of drawers, couches and chairs were some items he had sent to the landfill in good condition. Fladgate said there was a “crazy” number of drawers and mattresses.

Junk Boss owner Alex Fladgate and his brother Nathan Fladgate.

Last month, the company reached out to their customers on Facebook for any items they wanted them to look out for.

“Let me know what you want and I’ll keep my eyes peeled for you - free of charge, I just hate seeing perfectly good stuff go to the dump,” he said in the post.

After receiving comments on his post, Fladgate made a list of people’s names and numbers and had been receiving an increasing number of requests.

“I wanted to give it away for free and especially now when everything’s tight- a free desk can go a long way.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Fladgate said it was a “win-win” situation for both Junk Boss and the community, as dumping rubbish was becoming pricier.

Tauranga City Council had increased rubbish dumping fees from $38 to $43 per 100kg on July 1.

“When you’re dumping truckloads of stuff, that mounts up really, really quickly.”

Each trip to the dump cost him between $80 to $300 depending on what was in the truck.

Fladgate said the jobs with the most items he could give away were from end-of-tenancy clean-ups and storage unit jobs.

These jobs were “gold mines” for donations, Fladgate said, as people wanted everything gone.

The business was employed by the Salvation Army to remove rubbish for emergency housing in Tauranga and Fladgate said he donated good-quality items to the charity “when he could”.

Desperate for donations

Waipuna Hospice’s second-hand stores were not receiving the amount of goods from household clean-outs that Junk Boss was.

Quite the opposite - the cost-of-living squeeze had left the charity with fewer donations as households held on to what they had.

That factor and more customers relying on affordable shopping meant they were not keeping up with demand.

Volunteers Eileen Griffin and Sandy Beckett, and manager Rebecca Laurent at the Fraser St Waipuna Hospice Charity Shop.

Furniture, clothing, linen, homewares and bric-a-brac such as cups, vases and trinkets were in high demand.

Waipuna Hospice general manager of retail Jace Dowman said goods needed to be in a “quality and sellable condition”, as they were having to pay rubbish removal fees for the disposal of of unsellable goods.

The Fraser St store’s manager, Rebecca Laurent, said the shop was at a “crisis point” as foot traffic and donations were down.

While more people were shopping at the charity for basic household items such as pots and pans, they were pickier about other goods.

Furniture and bric-a-brac such as cups, vases, and trinkets are in high demand at the Waipuna Hospice shop in Fraser St.

“If you want to come and replace your couch with something a bit more fabulous, and see one at our store you really love with a really good price, you might not get that anymore because you can’t afford to spend the extra money,” Laurent said.

Customers using the store for “needs over wants” had become a running theme.

Laurent expected the flow of items to pick up again in the next three to six months and the shop be “back on top” by Christmastime as the country eased out of the recession.

“We need our community to rally around us and if they’re cleaning out their stuff, bring it on down to Hospice because it’s for such a great cause.”

Waipuna Hospice is in desperate need of donations.

Sandy Beckett had volunteered with the charity for six years and said she had noticed “more people hanging on to their things for another year”.

“We have the customers, but we don’t have the items to give back to them.”

Rotorua Hospice shop chief executive Jonathan Hagger said their second-hand item donations had stayed “consistent” this year, with no fluctuations resulting from the current economic state.

Hagger said the shop’s relationship with its small community could be credited for the steady level of donations.

The Bay of Plenty Times spoke to other charity shops across the region and their workers said they were not down on donations.

Harriet Laughton is a multimedia journalist based in the Bay of Plenty.