St Vincent de Paul

St Vincent de Paul

The Society of St Vincent de Paul, affectionately known as ‘Vinnies’, is a charitable institution that has been providing kiwis with generosity, service and compassion for over 150 years. You’ll likely have seen one of Vinnies’ charity shops before - there are more than 60 spread across New Zealand, and 9 just in the Wellington region. You can find a Vinnies store near you here.

Vinnies’ charity shops are their main source of income for their welfare and social services operations, which makes them essential to Vinnies’ work in the community. However, their charity shops were also costing them ten of thousands of dollars in textile disposal fees each year, as a result of clothing donations from the community that weren’t fit to be sold. This was one of Vinnies’ main concerns when Millie Lambess, Marketing & Communications Manager, approached Your Sustainable Workplace at the beginning of 2018.

Millie, hard-working and compassionate (like all of the Vinnies staff we had the pleasure of meeting), was frustrated with the amount of waste that was ending up in the skip at the head office in Newtown and could see that there was huge potential for waste diversion and cost-savings. In February 2018 we conducted an assessment at Vinnies head office, as well as their Newtown store, and their ‘E’ grading confirmed that there was definitely room for improvement.

Based on our assessment, we provided Vinnies with a range of recommendations on how they could improve their existing systems, and we also had the pleasure of running a waste minimisation workshop with around 30 Vinnies staff and volunteers at one of their huis. Staff were engaged and receptive, and helped roll out a number of suggested changes, including setting up three new recycling streams (initially they only had a landfill skip), transitioning to compostable desk caddies instead of desk bins, and going plastic bag free in all of their op shops.

We returned for a reassessment in July 2019, and all Vinnies’ hard work resulted in a huge jump from an ‘E’ grading all the way up to an ‘A-’.  Ka pai, Vinnies! Their improved systems diverted an estimated 22 tonnes of waste from landfill each year, resulting in huge cost-savings for the organisation. A Green Team was also created, with five keen, green staff on board to keep driving the sustainability message home.

Vinnies also launched their amazing  Re Sew project in November 2017. The Re Sew programme takes discarded clothing and textiles that can’t be sold in their charity shops and repairs them for resale, turns them into new products (bags, hats, gloves, etc), or passes onto other community group projects. Re Sew also provides inclusive training opportunities for participants from welfare services, new immigrants, refugees and supported bridging programs, further aligning with Vinnies’ focus on social welfare.