When you drop a bag of pre-loved clothes, household items or furniture to Emmaus Village Carlton, it may feel like a small, simple act, but behind each donation lies a remarkable journey; one that transforms everyday items into tailored support, dignity, hope and a brighter future for people who have experienced homelessness.
At the centre of this process is our Under One Roof (U1R) warehouse which adjoins our drive through drop-off point, a busy hub of activity throughout the week.
Our U1R Manager, Steve Scott, a former companion and now staff member, who has been at the community for 11 years, talks us through the donation process and the different journeys your donations make.
Pre-sort
Three activities happen to every donated product before it hits the shelf – bringing it in, pre-sorting and then shop sorting and pricing. It’s not just a case of taking from car straight to the shelf – there’s a process it has to go through before it goes on display in our shops.
When people have a guided tour and see the size of the operations behind the scenes, they’re really surprised at the size of it. At the moment, it’s all very neat but when we’re busy-busy, you can’t move for the sheer volume of donations!
It all starts with the customer dropping off donations at the drive-through drop-off. Most of the time they’ll get out to help unload, but they don’t have to. The items are then taken by the unloading team and placed on shelves inside in the pre-sort area. We normally have two people working in this area and they place the donated items in the various different pre-sort areas, such as bric a brac, books, DVDs/CDs, Boutique and electrics.
These are then transferred downstairs to the dedicated sorting areas for each of the shop departments where they undergo the main sort; what’s useable, non-useable, what’s going to the shop and what’s going to recycling.
Books
We have different ways of sorting the books – one way is through World of Books – Sell Your Books Pro (previously Shopiago Trade-in). This is for anyone with second-hand books, CDs, DVDs or Computer Games taking up space in their warehouse or shop, including charities like ours. It’s a good outlet, especially for really niche stuff. You might have a good book donated, but it will invariably sit on the shelf for ages – World of Books gets them out to a much bigger audience and they’ll give us decent money for it, so it’s brilliant.
We use a hand scanner to scan the barcode for an instant price on each item World of Books accepts. Once we’ve checked out, booked our free collection and they’ve received our items, we get paid directly. The rates are much more favourable than those we’d earn from a bulk collection service.
Award-winning team
Our track record was so good with Shopiago (the trade-in’s previous name) that we won the ‘Trade-in Shop of the Year Award 2023’ for scanning 10,501 pre-loved books, CDs, DVDs and computer games. Read the full story here.
We then earmark a section of books to go on sale in the shop, but if books are not good enough for either of those two roots, they’ll get recycled. We get a bit of money for recycling, but the main benefit is reducing our carbon footprint. We never send books to landfill. We load a big artic lorry about every three months with books and cardboard for recycling. Because people have Google now and can look things up, heavy books such as encyclopaedias are no longer needed. We probably recycle about 100 tonnes per year, but we also recycle many tonnes of resold items every year too, so we’re preventing unnecessary waste.
Bric a brac – loved in Romania!
Items are brought downstairs to the designated bric a brac area and sorted into what will go to the shops. Items we can’t use but are not broken are collected by a company that re-uses them. It distributes items to countries like Romania who absolutely love British bric a brac; stuff that we think might be a bit tatty or chintzy, they love it!
The same people who take the bric-a-brac also take textiles – clothing, shoes and handbags, things like that, Everything is done by weight. We get a slightly different rate depending on what it is. At the moment the textiles market has fallen through and I’m only getting 25p per kilo – the national average is between 8p and 10p per kilo though, so we’re doing good on textiles. On bric-a-brac it’s something like 40p per kilo. It used to cost us – we had a skip out the back which we’d have to pay to dispose of, so this is not just generating money for us but taking away the bills.
Items that are broken and useless do go to waste, but this is minimal as most items can either be recycled or sold.
Boutique
We have an area for Boutique stuff and this is sorted into what will go into the shop or the Chapel. Clothing donations are particularly plentiful and this is an area that’s always high volume and growing. I’ve got a stable team in clothing and over the years they’ve got more efficient sorting systems in place, so hopefully nothing gets missed.
It’s sorted in colour-coded bags; the red bags are what the team thinks is good enough to go in the shop. Anything in bad condition and not sellable goes straight to yellow for recycling. However, this is double checked by supervisor Jenny and her team to make the final decision, so there’s a process within a process to ensure nothing is missed.
We also have clothing that is in decent condition and sellable but not suitable for the Boutique. This will be allocated to our cheaper rummage rail or jumble sale in our Chapel where we do things such as fill a bag for £10 or price items at £1 each. These are our pop-up sales which happen every few months and were introduced at the beginning of the year and have proved to be really popular. The jumble sales usually make a couple of thousand pounds, so are really great fundraisers for us.
Gift Aid your donation to make it go further!
If you are a UK taxpayer, please choose the Gift Aid option when donating as this allows us to generate up to 25% more income from every donation, at no extra cost to you.
Ask our team for a Gift Aid form to make your donations that much bigger.
How Gift Aid works
- Sign up
Ask a member to sign you up to Gift Aid. You only have to sign up once and your details are not passed on to any third party. Please print out the Gift Aid Declaration and Loyalty Form and bring it along with your donation. You will receive a unique donor number to use the next time you donate to us.
- Donate
When you donate items to us, remember to either attach your donor number to the item / bag or give your donor number to a member of our team.
- 25% more
Thank you! When your donation sells in one of our shops, we will put a claim in to the Government and it will be worth 25% more to Emmaus Village Carlton – without costing you a penny!
Who is eligible for Gift Aid?
- UK taxpayers who have paid income tax or capital gains tax that is at least equal to the amount we reclaim.
- Pensioners if they pay tax, such as on a private pension plan or savings account, or on capital gains tax on the sale of property or shares.
Find out how to donate your unwanted items for resale at Emmaus Village Carlton.
Thank you for your support.