What happens to my Goodwill donations?

To celebrate Declutter For A Cause Month, Goodwill Northern New England is sharing The Adventures of a Goodwill Donation to explain what happens to the items you donate to Goodwill.

It starts with you!

The donation process begins with you. As seen in The Adventures of a Goodwill Donation, a closet clean out set the Three Musketees on a journey to find new homes. Once dropped off at a Goodwill donation center, donations are sorted into bins full of similar items. They are then priced and displayed on the store’s sales floor for customers to shop. 

Goodwill stores

Goodwill Northern New England donations spend three weeks on the store sales floor before being discounted. Every single item in Goodwill is priced with a colored tag or sticker. There are six tag colors, and new ones go on sale each week. In an item’s fourth week on the floor, they and all other items tagged with the same color are discounted at 50%. In their fifth week, they are further discounted to 75% off. These discounts are known as Goodwill’s Color of the Week sales. They are just one part of our sustainability efforts to keep materials in circulation. They also give shoppers a bargain and make room for fresh merchandise. 

Goodwill Outlets

Items that don’t sell in Goodwill’s retail stores head to a Goodwill Outlet. Outlets, often referred to as “the bins,” are where donated items get one last chance to find a home on the consumer level. In the outlets, items are sold by weight: Textiles and soft goods are $2 per pound while books, glassware and hard goods are just 50 cents per pound. The bins rotate through fresh inventory multiple times a day. Every item sold is one that stays out of a landfill, and every penny Goodwill earns makes a difference in the communities we serve. 

Reuse or recycle

Goodwill has a way to reuse or recycle almost everything; an item’s path depends on what it is. For example, the third Muskatee was ultimately repurposed into a Goodwill Wiping Cloth. Instead of throwing away shirts or towels we can’t sell, we send them to our warehouse where they are cut up, turned into wiping cloths and sold to local boat builders and artists. Donated electronics are refurbished and sold through GoodTech, and unusable computers and their parts are wiped and recycled through our partnership with Dell Reconnect. Kitchenware, electronic wires, shoes, stuffed animals and other leftover items all have homes with businesses that buy them in bulk. Cardboard, metal and plastic that don’t have alternate uses (ruined Monopoly boxes, broken fake Christmas trees, warped plastic toys, etc.) all get recycled. 

The moral of the story

No matter what path donations take, they help Goodwill Northern New England help people who need support achieving personal stability across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. There are a few items that cannot be recycled, which is why it’s so important that only the items we can accept get donated. When we receive old air conditioners, mattresses, or anything we can’t sell – we do have to throw them away, and that cost takes away from our mission work.  

Goodwill NNE stores divert 50+ million pounds of donated goods from landfills annually – but we can only do that great work with your help. Interested in learning more or seeing our behind-the-scenes operations in person? Sign up for a tour of our warehouse! To find a Goodwill store, donation center or outlet near you, visit our locations page.