A CASE OF DUMP AND RUN
Moving-day ‘donations’ often junk
Société de St-vincent de Paul de Montréal general manager Denise Ouellette has seen her share of unusual — and unusable — moving-day donations in the six years she’s been at the helm of the aid organization.
As she spoke to the Montreal Gazette on Thursday, Ouellette noticed a solitary mattress had been left in front of Société de St-vincent de Paul headquarters. That’s nothing compared to the various tree trunks, car tires and construction residue her organization has had to dispose of over the years.
“There are people who come here to make donations — and then there are people who come here to dump their stuff,” Ouellette said Thursday in a phone interview. “That’s what disappoints me the most. I’m sure there are a lot of very clean houses in Montreal these days.”
The start of July is traditionally the busiest time of year for relocating in Quebec, which means thousands of Montrealers are looking to cut down on clutter. The COVID-19 crisis, which led many people to renovate their homes during confinement, has only deepened the trend.
At Le Support, a St-léonardbased organization that sells used clothes and household goods to fight intellectual disabilities, administrative director Alain Mongrain can rattle off a list of unwanted “gifts” that includes sofas, paint containers and broken vacuum cleaners.
“Many people treat our collection bins as dumps,” Mongrain said Thursday. “They’re too lazy to bring their goods to the right places. I call them ‘questionable donators.’ It’s a problem yearround, but particularly around July 1.”
Through a network of about 200 bins located near dépanneurs, pharmacies, supermarkets and shopping malls, Le Support takes in most household items, except for big furniture and large home appliances.
Depending on the location, bins are emptied three to six times a week, Mongrain said.
Fondation des Grands Frères et Grandes Soeurs de Montréal had five vehicles patrolling the streets on Wednesday to pick up unwanted items left outside the foundation’s 115 collection bins, according to general manager Jean Laberge.
“People always leave a lot of stuff at this time of year, and this July 1 was no exception,” Laberge said. “Over time, we’ve learned to have people on duty to clean things up.”
Stéphane Lamarche, who runs Le Magasin du Chaînon on St-laurent Blvd., was one of two employees who came into work on Canada Day — even though the thrift store was officially closed — to clear the loading area in preparation for Thursday’s reopening.
“July 1 is always busy, but all of June is a really big month for donations, because people are getting ready to move,” Lamarche said. “If we hadn’t come in Wednesday, there would have been too many items at the back for us to operate normally.”
With many non-profits having slowed or stopped accepting donated items for health reasons during the lockdown, moving day seems to have unleashed a torrent of sometimes excessive generosity this year.
“All the donations we didn’t get during confinement, we’ve been getting them since the end of May,” Lamarche said. “Sometimes it looks like people decided to get rid of everything they couldn’t sell at their garage sale.”
Unauthorized dumping not only adds to employee workload, it forces organizations such as Le Support to hire waste management companies to pick up items that cannot be sold.
“Most of the items left outside collection bins are worthless, so when you leave your broken furniture or worn-out tires, it actually costs us money to have a specialized firm take them away,” Le Support’s Mongrain said. “That costs thousands of dollars every year. And when the items are left outside and it rains, you can’t sell them.”
The way Mongrain sees it, unauthorized dumping speaks to a basic lack of courtesy on the part of many Montrealers.
“People are selfish,” he said. “A collection bin is not a dump. That’s what ecocentres are there for. How hard is that to understand?”