BEING greeted by an enormous pile of discarded household furniture and rubbish is not the way charity volunteers should have to start their day but it was the lot of Vinnies workers on Sunday.
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The problem is not a new one; people who decide it is easier and possibly a lot cheaper to dump unwanted household items at St Vincent de Paul or other charity shops rather than take a trip to the tip.
Most charity shops have CCTV coverage to help them identify people who help themselves to donated goods but the cameras might also help in this instance to find a person who made repeated trips to the Vinnies store when the resource recycling centre was really the place he should have been heading.
Unfortunately there was virtually nothing of any value which meant the charity had to waste its time as well as the time of council staff loading the rubbish up again and taking it to the tip.
Charities like Vinnies are not there to hand out broken, soiled or damaged goods to their clients.
Goods of good quality are either given to people in need or sold to raise money to support welfare work.
Either way, expecting people to accept things you have thrown away because they are rubbish is not on.
It says a lot about the sort of people who dump their junk and what they think of charity volunteers and those in the community in need of a hand.
With any luck the police will use a number plate to track down the individual who thought it was OK to dump all his rubbish.
When they do the Vinnies staff will be hoping they can deal with him the same way they deal with people who dump illegally in bushland out of town.
In an ideal world a stint of court-ordered weekend community service cleaning up known dump sites would be a suitable deterrent.