We’ve all been tempted by companies that promise us cash for our gold, clothing and mobile phones. Its a fast-growing industry and as a clearance company focusing on recycling, we’re often a link in that chain… passing items on to charities or recycling companies.
Part of what we do involves collecting and recycling clothes, so recently we decided to do a test-run with one of the main companies encouraging you to return to earn. The website looked good, the staff seemed professional. We prepared a 10kg bag of clothes and dropped it off at their depot, expecting 60 pence a kilo in return. Provided the experience went well, we’d be bringing them around a ton of clothes a month.
Imagine our surprise when we received a payment of £1.20! The company were quick to get back to us – explaining that we had supplied them with 9KG of clothes, of which 7KG were bobbled, heavily worn or stained and as a result had been ‘rejected’.
Oops. Firstly, we’d provided 10KG. Secondly, understanding that the company were not interested in heavily-worn or bobbled clothing we had carefully selected a bag of clean, barely-worn (and in many cases brand new) designer and high-street clothing.
Despite repeated assertions that we were a recycling company looking to establish regular trade with the company, and that we had carefully checked the clothing as we understand the industry well, they refused to accept our comments – assuring us that their workers spent a considerable amount of time on a small amount of clothes every day and were supervised to ensure quality control.
This may well be the case and as I said previously, the website looks good and the staff are professional. However, when it came to making a complaint, we faced a wall of denial. As a result, the issue was not resolved and the company in question were in breach of contract, refusing to refund us or return the clothes.
Through brazenly deceiving us, they also lost out on considerable business. Today we signed a contract to clear 8 tons of clothing – all of which would have been heading their way. We even told them that and STILL they would not admit their wrongdoing, apologise or seek to remedy the situation in any way whatsoever.
Our advice if you want to recycle your clothes? Take them to the charity shop. Its quicker, easier and you’ll be doing something very worthwhile.
