Ellie Auskelis’s kitchen table came from the tip shop. So did her bicycle, and her children’s bicycles. And the kayak strapped to the roof of her car.
“I think [the table] cost me $10 with eight chairs,” says Auskelis. “It’s beautiful and wooden. It’s extendable, and it’s just glorious.”
Tip shops or reuse shops are popular in regional Australia and often operate in tandem with the landfill sites run by the local council. Tip workers assess goods as they come in, diverting salvageable waste from landfill. If you have a good eye and some DIY skills, they can be treasure troves.
But Auskelis’s local tip shop, in Armidale in the New England region of New South Wales, was abruptly closed by council in December on grounds of public safety. In January, she started a petition to save the shop that she says plays an important role in supporting at-risk members of the community, including Armidale’s growing Ezidi community.
“It was kind of like a third space for a lot of people,” she says.
“Not like home, not like work, but an extra place where people went and socialised.”
Auskelis’s home is full of things from the tip shop. Last year, she had a waste-free Christmas, with everything from the tree to the presents under it sourced from the tip shop.
Armidale council said in a public statement this month that the decision to close the shop just before the Christmas break was not taken “lightly”, and that out of respect to the former lessees of the shop it had taken “a minimalist approach to the amount of information it disclosed”. It added that council would be “only too happy to set the record straight” if the lessees provided written consent.
The council told Guardian Australia it was reviewing all options to re-establish the service as soon as practicable and that council staff have been continuing to stockpile items brought to the recovery centre for sale in a future tip shop, as well as preparing a temporary site for the community to use.
Many tip shops in the regions are run by community cooperatives. The acting CEO of Sustainability Victoria, Christine Tipton, says tip shops are practising recycling at its first principles.
“By keeping those items in circulation, it means less waste, fewer virgin materials are consumed and energy emissions are reduced,” says Tipton.
Since October 2022 the Victorian government, through Sustainability Victoria, has provided $840,651 to six councils to establish resale sheds.
“In many cases, resale shops can also provide an additional source of income for local community groups and employment for community members,” says Tipton.
“They also provide a wonderful opportunity to snag a bargain or pick up a treasure.”
The Eaglehawk Recycle Shop, on the outskirts of Bendigo in central Victoria, opened in 1994 after a local man and a group of community youth support scheme workers got the rights from council to scrounge the landfill for goods they could sell or recycle.
They collected enough to fill a shed and started a sales area onsite, which has since grown into the purpose-built facility at the entrance to the transfer station. The shop’s manager, Annette Wiles, says all of the shop’s products are dropped off by community members on their way through to the rubbish bays.
The shop is split into a sales area, which drives 70% of their income, and a recycling area which includes services like paint disposal, e-waste disposal and polystyrene, metal and cardboard recycling.
Wiles says she knows at least one customer who has built their home entirely out of recycled products, including some from the tip shop. “They have done a magic job on their house – stained glass windows, the works. It’s brilliant,” she says.
The shop is now on the recommended route for bargain hunters from Melbourne.
All prices are determined by the knowledge of the staff and the condition of the product. Wiles says there are clear trends in particular recycled products – mattress springs were all the rage a while ago – and she enjoys hearing how people will put their finds to use.
“They don’t look at a sink as a sink, they look at it something else,” she says. “What it appears to be is not exactly what people want it for.”
The rise of upcycling – refinishing and often reselling second-hand furniture and other goods – has also driven interest in tip shops. Resource Recovery Australia, a not-for-profit organisation partnering with councils across Australia, holds an upcycling competition with entrants ranging from an entire caravan built out of waste to an old boot repurposed as a pot plant.
The organisation began in 1992 at the Tuncurry tip shop on the NSW mid-north coast. Now a national operation, it aims to divert waste from landfill, create employment and training for people with barriers to work and foster a sense of community through reuse centres. Last year it helped divert 11,965 tonnes of waste from landfill.
Resource Recovery Australia now runs 11 “reuse” shops. Amanda Henderson, a spokesperson for the organisation, says they dropped the tip shop name to encourage people to think differently about recycled goods.
“It’s about flipping that mentality and turning it into a sustainability story, and making sure that people when they come into our shops see the value in items rather than seeing it as rubbish,” she says.
For Auskelis, the Armidale tip shop was a community meeting point as much as a source of bargains.
“The thing that made it so great was that it was run by people in our community, for our community,” she says. “What makes Armidale great is the people in it … We’re isolated and we kind of only have each other, so it just makes sense to keep all of our things community driven and community focused.”
