Planet Aid

from the Boston Globe, 21st Feb, 1999

By Coco McCabe, Globe Correspondent


That soft wool coat you spent $300 on 12 years ago still looks pretty good, but it's been hanging in the closet, forgotten, for several winters. It's time to unload it, along with the mound of other clothing the kids have outgrown or time has outdated.

The pile's pretty big and has some value. But here's the catch: Who gets to make a buck on the bundle?

Plenty of people would love to.

It's not war yet, but competition for your castoffs is growing. A sure sign is the ubiquitous clothing drop-off bins sprouting at train stations, at the edge of commercial parking lots, and in recycling centers around the region.

Red, white, blue, yellow, green, some come with familiar names, others with catchy logos. There are the stalwarts, such as the Salvation Army. And the newcomers, such as Planet Aid. And the for-profits, such as New England Clothes Recycling.

Even old and well-liked charities that have never before been in the business are jumping in -- and raising some eyebrows. The American Red Cross of Massachusetts Bay, which extends into this region, has hired a company to run a clothing salvage program. For every pound of clothes the company collects, the Red Cross gets 5 cents. In five months, its 45 collection boxes (which currently only go as far north as Burlington) have earned the agency more than $27,000.

But all are after the same thing: the contents of the closet you just cleaned out.

``It's very competitive,'' said Maurice Pratt, speaking into a car phone on his way to oversee the installation of three new bins in Newburyport and Rowley. Pratt is public relations manager for the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a worldwide organization dedicated to helping the poor. In the region north of Boston, the society has planted 100 drop-off bins, 50 of them within the past year.

In the past two years, the Roxbury-based Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries, which serves this area, has increased the number of its collection bins from 40 to 100 in the eastern part of the state. And since Lt. Col. Alan Thompson arrived four years ago to head the Salvation Army for the Boston area, the organization has put out 75 more boxes for a total of 180. Its weekly haul of goods from the bins, which often includes more than clothes, weighs about 100,000 pounds.

But for organizations like the Salvation Army, which spends 83 percent of every dollar it brings in on its programs, donations of goods are its bread and butter. Thompson said his operation, which last year had a budget of just under $8 million, is entirely supported by donations from the bins and trucks.

That's why he finds the burst of new bins galling.

``When you start seeing these other boxes with strange names, I have questions about what they're doing,'' said Thompson. ``It's been a constant aggravation for someone like us relying on these donations. But, it's America.''

And anyone can get in on the act.

Planet Aid, Inc. has -- in a very visible way. Its small, creamy yellow bins with the blue and green earth bobbing in the middle now number 600 in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with the bulk placed around the Boston area. In Ipswich alone there are at least three, with a fourth just over the town line by a well-traveled road in Essex. And Mikael Norling, president of the company, said he would like to see clothing donations double, or more, by the end of this year.

``My general position is there are plenty of clothes,'' said Norling, answering critics who worry about newcomers edging in on their turf. He cited statistics showing that the majority of used clothing in this country still gets thrown away. ``It's a growing commodity and it's a good thing not to throw things away. Our idea is to now expand the collection and to sort clothes and send a large chunk overseas,'' Norling added.

Founded just two years ago, the nonprofit company now runs a large, factory-outlet type store in Lawrence and a slightly more upscale store in Waltham. It has four trucks (with two more soon to be added) and a crew of 25 employees, from sorters to truck drivers to people beating the bushes for new bin locations.

What does Planet Aid do? According to one of its boxes, the organization supports community health programs, tree planting, schools for street children, small business enterprises and food production in Africa.

Its focus, said Norling, is to support projects overseas. In 1998, the organization's expenses -- and income -- were about $1 million, he said. According to Norling, 90 percent of what Planet Aid brought in went to program expenses such as truck drivers, sorters and bins, and $120,000 went directly to projects overseas. Norling added that Planet Aid is helping the state meet its recycling goals by removing material from the waste stream.

``We are a new organization and in the middle of building a system able to generate a lot more,'' Norling said.

Convenience might be helping the group's bottom line. Planet Aid bins in Ipswich are planted in places people visit regularly: at the side of a gas station, between a convenience store and the laundromat, and next to a sub shop. One Ipswich woman, noticing a bin on a street near her (and not miles away down the twisty road at the transfer station where the Salvation Army and Goodwill have their bins side by side), gleefully unloaded a pile of her castoffs -- without bothering to read what the bin was all about.

But part of what it's about, said Norling, is choice.

``I don't think they have to make it either-or,'' said Norling. ``Some people would like to donate to us because we support overseas projects. We give a lot to Africa and some to Latin America. We give to countries where people are in dire need.''

Choice is what folks in Topsfield and Boxford also get. Those towns have a contract with a for-profit textile collector, Ecosmith Recyclers of Manchester, N.H. Proceeds from the items tossed into the Ecosmith bins help defray the cost of the towns' recycling programs.

``The town of Topsfield is being given three choices of what to do with their consciences,'' said Danielle Dillaway, a member of the town's recycling committee. St. Vincent de Paul has bins in the village center, the Salvation Army's are placed at the intersection of routes 1 and 97, and Ecosmith is at the recycling center.

And though Ecosmith is keeping some odds and ends out of the waste stream, it's not a huge money-maker. Karen Sheridan, chairman of Boxford's recycling committee, estimated her town makes only about $300 a year on the textiles, which are sold to the company for between 5 cents and 7 cents a pound.

It doesn't help, said Peter Shellenberger, Ecosmith's owner, that the markets for used textiles are severely depressed right now. Shellenberger's 8-year-old firm also buys used clothes from charities and sells them to export companies. But because economies overseas are struggling, the prices he can get are way down, he said.

``The other thing that's making this market depressed is a lot of people who weren't collecting now are and are flooding the market,'' Shellenberger said.

In Peabody and Middleton, those in a spring cleaning frenzy can take their used clothes to bins put out by the for-profit New England Clothes Recycling Co., a 5-year-old firm headquartered in Chelmsford. Dwight Robinson, president of the company, said he got into the business when he realized there weren't enough bins around for people to conveniently unload their castoffs -- and recycling groups in some of the communities in his region told him the same.

Now, he's got 100 boxes spread between southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts on the grounds of private businesses and at some transfer stations. Though the bins are labeled as public clothing drops, they also have stickers, said Robinson, alerting people to the fact that they are owned by a private company and not a charity. Robinson sells the wearable clothing to thrift shops, mostly in Canada.

What's his answer to the charitable organizations who are wagging their fingers at him?

``My idea is let people do what they want,'' said Robinson. ``It's up to people to decide.''

And that means it's up to all the players in this field to get savvy with their marketing. 

``The world of charities is very competitive and very market oriented,'' said Larry Raff, Goodwill's vice president for development and external affairs.

St. Vincent de Paul, which directs 60 cents of every dollar it earns through clothing collections into its programs, just wrapped up six months of advertising with Channel 7, where a spot promoting the organization ran three times a week.

So where does that leave you and that nice wool coat you were hoping to unload without much thought?

For Ipswich's Martha Hayward, the answer is the same as it's always been. She'll ship her best things to a consignment store where clerks will set the price and she'll get a cut -- and where, if things don't sell, they're often donated to a charity anyway.

But when it comes to winter coats, no one can compete with the Salvation Army. Hayward will make the long drive to the transfer station where the Salvation Army bin is, or even down Route 1 to the Saugus headquarters.

``Just the familiarity of the name makes me think it will get into the right hands,'' she said. ``When people need winter coats, they really need them.''