Living in a material world ...

You can't live in Helsinki for long without noticing the UFF shops.  One of my Finnish friends is a big fan, regularly scouring the branch on Kalevankatu after a coffee at Gran Delicato.  But I hadn't picked up on their supply chain until this weekend.

Back home, we have a lot of charity shops, run by organisations such as Oxfam, Sue Ryder and the like. Each relies on donations brought to the store.  In addition, groups such as the Salvation Army or my own local favourite, the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Air Ambulance, have collecting bins in public places; the latter has one in the car park of our village hall.

But here in Finland, UFF has an end to end approach.  This morning, after a wet Sunday spent sorting through the wardrobe, I took a bag of clothes to a collecting container, one block away, having checked on their website for my nearest site.

According to the UFF website, they have these in about 131 municipalities in southern Finland. In total there are over 600 container sites. In 2008 UFF Finland collected and recycled 7.6 million kilos of clothes.

In addition to reselling used winter clothes wholesale to other European countries, they also have 8 second hand shops in the largest cities in Finland: 6 shops in the capital Helsinki, one in Tampere and one in Turku. In 2008, a total of 400,000 paying customers (or one person in 13 in Finland) visited the UFF shops.

UFF (more fully, U-landshjälp från Folk till Folk i Finland rf) was founded more than 20 years ago as an independent non-profit non-governmental humanitarian organization. In 2008 they supported 19 development projects in Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Zambia and India.

This country has a very enlightened approach to recycling generally.  But I am pleased to think that my few items donated will have a positive impact on those less fortunate elsewhere in the world.