General News
25 February, 2026
Not a dump site
THE Cobden Uniting Church op shop is a place the community can go to find all great things second-hand, but recently volunteers have encountered issues with ransacking and low-quality donations.
Volunteers at the op shop donate their time to sift through donations and get them on the racks for shop-goers to browse through, but not everything they get is sellable.
Op shop joint manager Barbara Cowley said it was “disheartening” to receive dirty and stained clothes and items and to come into the store in the morning to find the donations left overnight had been gone through and scattered on the front veranda.
“If you wouldn’t give the donation to your friends, don’t give them to the op shop,” she said.
“We often get donations that are beautifully clean and packed, they’re lovely, left outside.
“Then we get a lot of stuff that we put straight in the bin.
“Sometimes we get used underwear and dirty socks and that – we just have to throw them in the bin.
“We’ve had actual bags of bin rubbish – paper, drink containers, actual rubbish.”
Mrs Cowley said while the op shop appreciated donations from the community, they had to be of good quality.
“It’s disrespectful to the volunteers to have to sort through rubbish,” she said.
“You can often tell, when we get a big bag – they’re usually in black plastic bags – when there’s a whole heap of stuff just thrown in.
“If things are neatly folded and you can see someone’s taken care to put them in, you know they’re going to be good things.
“We have a skip and we try to minimise the amount we put in there because it’s costing us money and the amount we spend on that we’re not able to give out to the community or spend in more positive ways.”
Recently the op shop veranda has frequently been ransacked overnight, leaving volunteers to come to a mess out the front in the morning before opening.
Mrs Cowley said they were looking to install cameras out the front to try and deter this from happening further.
“It used to happen occasionally but it’s escalated to become a common occurrence,” she said.
“Some of our volunteer time is taken up with cleaning up the mess that other people leave overnight.
“We encourage people to bring things in when we’re open.
“We’ve got an opportunity then to say yes or no and they’re happy to take it away and deal with it elsewhere.
“It’s very annoying having to spend some of our day tidying up the donations which are scattered around, bags ripped, and we know some things have been taken.”
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Mrs Cowley said there have been instances where people have come to ask about their donations which were left overnight, only for volunteers at the op shop to never have received them.
“About 12 months or so ago we had some people come in, who had lost their remote control and they thought it might have been in the donations they’d left the night before, but we didn’t get them,” she said.
“Someone had taken the whole lot – they were good quality linen and the whole lot had gone.
“If we see donations on the veranda and we’re driving past when we’re not open we’ll bring them inside or look through them ourselves to make sure there’s no valuable things in them.
“We get some beautiful donations which help out our financial situation so we can give out the money to the community.
“It’s a common problem with all op shops.”
Mrs Cowley said she wanted people to know if they needed things, they were more than welcome to come in and ask.
“If you’re desperate, talk to us, and we’ll help you out – there’s no need to steal things from us,” she said.
“Hopefully when we get security cameras they will discourage people from doing that.”
Mrs Cowley said she wanted to emphasise the op shop received plenty of wonderful quality donations, but coming to the shop and seeing a trashed front veranda on several occasions was upsetting.
At the moment, she said she wanted to encourage people to donate old sheets and towels because the op shop could cut rags from them.
“We get a lot of bags and we like to have our sheets in bags,” Mrs Cowley said.
“When you buy linen, the plastic wrapping they come in, that’s handy for us – we can recycle that to keep our linen nice and tidy and clean.
“We donate soft toys to the primary school and puppets to the library.”
Excess donations and lower quality items are passed on to Recycle Care Australia, but some are still forced to be thrown out, which Mrs Cowley said she wanted to avoid if possible.
She said a way the community could help was by volunteering some of their time to wash or mend items.
“You don’t have to dedicate time to the shop to help with volunteering,” Mrs Cowley said.
“If you want to help, you can volunteer from home by washing things for us, or helping in other ways such as mending items or cleaning silver.”
Read More: Cobden