Clothing recycling bins are disappearing from supermarket and council car parks across the UK, costing the charities that should benefit from them hundreds of thousands of pounds, it is claimed.

According to the Textile Recycling Association, the UK’s trade association, 750 clothing banks have recently gone missing from all parts of the UK except Scotland. Some have been found, repainted with the logo of an organisation that is being investigated by the Charity Commission.

“This is a problem that has been coming on over the last 18 months,” Ian Woods, the TRA’s president, said on BBC Five Live Investigates. The issue was not new, he said, since clothing recycling bins had disappeared from 2009-10, too. He said though that now the removal issue was “coming back with a vengeance”. He appealed for the police to take the matter more seriously.

While big charities such as the British Heart Foundation have their own bins, many clothing banks are run by companies for the benefit of smaller charities. These charities get about £250 per tonne of clothes, which can give them an income of perhaps £70 a week. There are about 15,000 banks across the UK.

Most of the removals of the bins take place at night, Woods said, and they were undertaken by gangs in transit vans. The charities lose out and subsequently may also have to cover the high cost of replacing the bins, which can take weeks, if done at all. He said the cost of buying a new bin could be between £600 and £1000, which would rise to a maximum of £1,500 if repainting with the charity livery were factored in.

It could cost £1m to replace all 750 bins which had disappeared, Woods said.

Investigators working for the TRA have located 200 clothing bins which, they said, appeared to have been repainted with the logo of a registered Wolverhampton-based charity called Helping Our Future and placed without authorisation in supermarket car parks.

Helping Our Future is the subject of a Charity Commission investigation. In a statement, a commission spokesman said: “The commission is examining the charity Helping Our Future as part of a regulatory compliance case. We have serious concerns about its management and activities, and are examining trustees’ oversight of the charity, its relationship with third parties, including commercial fundraising companies, and whether the charity’s management and operations have given rise to inappropriate benefit on the part of private individuals or companies.

“While our engagement is underway, we cannot comment in detail about our findings to date or the likely outcome of the case. However, we take potential abuse of charities, and of public trust in charities, very seriously indeed, and will take robust action where such abuses take place.”



On its website Helping Our Future describes itself as “a multi-platform, national charity covering the needs and expectations of the people in order to make their lives better”. It has programmes and fundraising linked to a number of topics. Under environment it lists its “waste prevention scheme” with a picture of its clothing recycling bins.

The charity denied any wrongdoing, the BBC reported. The Guardian has contacted Helping our Future for comment.

A trading company involved with the charity’s clothing recycling scheme gave Five Live a statement denying any wrongdoing. “We are contracted to abide by a written protocol which prevents us from carrying out any criminal activity and bringing any holistic partner into disrepute,” it said.