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WHAT IS IT?
‘Donate or Dump?’
Client: Sue Ryder charity shop
Role: Design Researcher and Designer
From October 2022 to April 2023 I volunteered at the Sue Ryder charity shop in Forest Hill. The experience was fascinating: full of laughs and wonderful people, but also shadowed by an existential dread of seeing just how much “stuff” we humans produce.
Each bag of donations brought a quick hit of joy—maybe this one would raise real money for the charity—followed by the sobering truth that more than half of what arrived was unsellable. I often felt literally dumped on, moment by moment.
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INSIGHT
I decided to create an intervention to help customers and donors become more discerning, open up conversation to make customers possibly question the habits they’d come to think of as normal. At the till I asked regulars what they believed the role of a charity shop was, and whether they knew how to recycle textiles too damaged to sell. This was a tricky topic to talk about without offending them, so I would frame it as a societal and very human problem and had some wonderful conversations as a result.
Working with the shop manager, I designed a series of informative banners made from textile waste. Updated weekly, the banners shared key stats: how much was donated, how much was diverted to recycling or disposal, and how much actually sold.
To extend the conversation, I also founded Chazzer Craft Club—a community up-cycling session where people could experiment with waste textiles and discover their hidden potential.