Guide to Packing & Preparing your Donations
Once you’ve booked your collection date, the next step is to pack your donations securely into a bag or box, ready for our driver to collect. For safety reasons, we’re unable to accept loose items, as they can be damaged or may damage other donations during transport. To help make the process as smooth as possible, we’ve put together a quick guide to ensure your items are packed safely and suitably for collection day.
Topics this Packing guide Covers…
This guide includes helpful tips on the following:
- Choosing the Right Bags or Boxes
- Knowing What Size Is Right
- How to Pack Fragile or Sharp Items Safely
- Sorting and Labelling Your Donations Clearly
- Guidance for Large Donation Collections
- Where to Place Your Donations for Collection
Choosing the Right Bags or Boxes
You can pack your donations in any type of bag or box—we’re flexible! Sturdy bin bags, bags for life, cardboard boxes, or even clean shopping bags all work just fine. The most important thing is that your items are contained and easy to carry for our drivers.
As a general guide, we recommend using boxes for heavier or fragile items, like crockery, kitchenware, or small electricals, as they offer more protection. Softer items, such as clothing, bedding, or soft toys, are best packed in bags, which are easier to load and handle. Whatever you choose, just make sure it’s secure and won’t split during transport.
Continue to BookingKnowing What Size Is Right
When we bring your donations back to the warehouse, we categorise them and pack them into boxes ready to be distributed. All of the donations we receive must fit into these boxes so we can rehome them. The box dimensions are as follows:
- Length = 60cm
- Width = 40cm
- Height = 30cm
Anything larger than these dimensions, we are not able to rehome, unfortunately. This is why we are not able to collect large bulky items.
How to Pack Fragile or Sharp Items Safely
When you’re packing fragile or sharp items, please wrap them up nice and snug so they don’t break (or break anything else!) during collection. Things like crockery, glassware, or delicate electricals travel best in sturdy boxes with plenty of bubble wrap or old newspaper to keep them safe and in one piece. It’s best to avoid putting these breakables in bags, as boxes give them much better protection on the move.
For anything sharp like kitchen knives, hand saws, or tools, please cover the sharp ends with something protective. This helps keep our drivers safe and stops your other donations from getting damaged while everything’s in the back of the van.
Continue to BookingSorting and Labelling Your Donations Clearly
If If you’re leaving your donations outside for our driver to pick up, please pop a label on them so it’s clear they’re for us. Nothing fancy needed — just a piece of paper that says “Anglo Doorstep Collections” stuck to your bags or boxes does the job perfectly. This helps our driver know exactly what to collect.
To make sorting a breeze, it’s really helpful if you can pack your donations into these three groups:
🧥 Clothes, shoes & textiles
📚 Books
🏠 Bric-a-brac (everything else!)
It’s not a strict requirement, but it does make things run a lot smoother for our team when we’re loading up and sending your donations on their way!
Continue to BookingGuidance for Large Donation Collections
If you’ve got a lot of donations ready for us, please give us a heads-up! While we do have a limit of 10 boxes of books per collection, there’s no limit on other items. But if you have around 20 or more bags or boxes, it really helps if we know in advance so we can make sure there’s enough space in the van to collect everything in one go.
If your collection is on the larger side, just send us a quick photo of your items and let us know roughly how many bags or boxes there are. You can do this by replying to your booking confirmation email or by emailing us at info@anglodoorstepcollections.co.uk.
To give us time to update our driver, please send the photo by 4pm the day before your collection. Once we’ve got it, we’ll confirm we’ve received it and make sure the driver knows what to expect.
Please note, this does not include the collection of any large bulky items, or items not packed in a box or bag.
Continue to BookingWhere to Place Your Donations for Collection
We’re very flexible about where you leave your donations for us to pick up. Whether you’d like to hand them over to our driver in person or prefer to leave them outside while you’re out and about — it’s completely up to you!
Here are the ways you can leave your donations for our driver:
If you decide to leave your donations in a safe spot for our driver to pick up, just add a note in your booking to let us know exactly where they’ll be and how to access them. That way, our driver can find them easily!
Continue to Booking