Salvation Army wages recycling war

The Salvation Army wants your junk.

Not only do old clothes get a new lease on life when donated to the Salvation Army, but the community also gets a boost.

The local charity has bolstered their recycling program with the purchase of a forklift and industrial baler to make the most of the thousands of pounds of clothing donated to the organization.

In their new depot located on Ogilvie Street and with the new equipment, the Salvation Army is managing to squeeze more cents out of the clothes that can't be sold in their Ospika Boulevard thrift store.

"We used to handle everything by garbage bags and we didn't have half the volume that we get now," said Capt. Neil Wilkinson, who noticed a need to step up recycling efforts after taking lead on the local ministry last year.

Every two weeks, the group is able to fill a 53-foot trailer with 48,000 lbs of textiles to be shipped to Delta. There it gets sorted further and anything salvagable is sold on the international market. Everything else gets recycled into things like insulation, Wilkinson said.

Prior to the purchase of the new equipment in April, the Salvation Army staff would load the trailer by hand, averaging about 800,000 lbs of textile recycling per year.

Wilkinson said they are on track to recycle three millions pounds this year, with each trailer bringing in between $7,000 to $8,000.

"The coolest thing is, this is a way for money to come into the Salvation Army so that we can help the community, without actually having to ask the community for money because this comes to us from outside of the city," Wilkinson said. "It's a way to keep the Salvation Army ministries going without digging into the pockets of our donors."

In addition to the textile recycling, the donation depot also accepts household electronics, which they send to a Canadian stewardship association.

"The scary thing about electronics, for example one CRT monitor... has about four pounds of lead in it. And once that goes to the landfill, it just sits there and pollutes the soil, pollutes the water," Wilkinson added.

The depot is staffed by four people, six days per week and Wilkinson said he would ultimately like to see it used as a workplace training program where those who have qualified for job skills programs.

"It's a great place for people to learn warehousing and things like that," he said.

The charity is also looking for about 100 feet of pallet shelving to help increase their floor space. In addition to being the sorting hub for the thrift store and recycling program, the building is also used to store surplus supplies for their food bank. "So if we had some pallet shelving, we could get it up off the floor and use the space for more recycling," Wilkinson said.