ROTTING pig’s heads, faeces, dead cats and syringes are among the revolting ‘donations’ people leave outside Brisbane op shops.

Salvos Stores area manager Stuart Estreich said dumping is a constant problem for many of the charity’s stores every Monday.

“It’s particularly bad over long weekends and the Easter weekend because it’s our longest stretch without us opening for the four days,” he said.

Mr Estreich said the organisation took its donation bins away four years ago because they were often contaminated by rubbish, but that it hadn’t stopped people dumping their garbage on the charity.

“Last weekend alone we had faecal matter left outside stores, we had nappies, we had personal hygiene products, syringes are common, we’ve had cats and kittens in the past. They were thrown in one of the bins over the weekend and something’s been put on top of them so some were alive and some weren’t. General household waste is a common thing that’s left for us,” he said.

“It’s our second biggest cost to the Salvo stores behind rent. We have one store that’s $80,000 a year in waste disposal.”

media_camera The Salvos store at Lutwyche after the Easter long weekend.

Mr Estreich urged people with genuine donations to bring them into their stores.

“The people who leave things on the side of the road don’t really care and it’s just to save them going to the tip basically. Our volunteers have to go through those bags every morning and it’s not a job that I would like to do,” he said.

“What makes it worse is that anything of value gets stolen or spread around all over the place.”

Mr Estreich said some stores go through bad cycles, and that the charity had been forced to fence off some of their southside stores to prevent people dumping garbage there.

“The dumping was that bad, we put a $16,000 fence up and we paid for that in three months by the reduction in our tipping fees,” he said.

“Lutwyche is probably the biggest one we have that’s an issue. The northern stores and the southern stores tend to be the worst. Kallangur’s our worst store by far. Eight Miles Plains we had to fence off because it was terrible. We were taking a truckload of rubbish away every Monday morning, but every store has dumping.”

Mr Estreich said the Salvos had worked with Brisbane City Council and police to reduce the waste dumped on the charity’s Red Hill premises.

“We’ve extended our opening hours in all of our stores to try and get people to do the right thing but at Red Hill, we can have 8-10 pallets of stuff left there every Monday morning. And if it’s rained over the weekend, most of it has to go in the tip.”

“We also had some volunteers come in on Easter Saturday to clean up a bit because it does get out of control.”

media_camera Vinnies at Sumner Park after Easter.

St Vincent de Paul’s western diocesan council president Joe De Pasquale said the organisation also experienced dumping around their shops and collection bins.

“What people don’t think about by disposing of unusable items is it’s a big cost to us as a society and all the other charities because it takes away from the job that we should be doing which is helping people in need,” he said.

“At Sumner Park, it took them three hours for eight people to clean up the mess and a lot of material was damaged or soiled and had to be taken to the dump. It’s not good for our volunteers who come here expecting to work and they’ve got to clean up stuff that’s been left behind.”

Mr De Pasquale also encouraged people wanting to donate goods to hand them over the counter at their local Vinnies store.