Are donation bins connected to a cult?

Published June 25, 2025 By admin

TOLEDO, Ohio — Editor’s note: This story was initially published by the Toledo Free Press, a media partner of WTOL 11. You can find the original here.

Cons, confusion and—in one case—connections to a cult are among the reasons Toledo-area charities say they want a crackdown on donation bins that siphon money away from their missions.

Goodwill Industries of Northwest Ohio is leading the charge, concerned that for-profit companies are using donation-style bins that most people associate with local charities to mislead well-intentioned people.

“It’s unfortunate because they think they’re helping people here and sometimes they’re not,” Goodwill vice president Tim Kravolic said. He oversees the organization’s thrift shop operation in Toledo.

It is on Goodwill’s radar nationwide as the number of look-alike boxes grows, Kravolic said.

This year, Ohio began requiring that collection bins include contact information for the organization benefitting from donations, as well as the bin’s owner if that bin is owned by a separate company on behalf of that organization. That company must also register with the Ohio attorney general’s office.

But Ohio’s law does not require “charitable organization” to be a registered, tax-exempt 501(c)(3), as long as its purpose is related to doing some kind of good, with examples like educational, public health and environmental conservation.

In a parking lot along Alexis Road, three bright blue bins advertise a “clothing and shoes collection drop bin” above spray-painted graffiti. The front of the bins encourages people to recycle with a list of items accepted here.

At the very bottom in the smallest of all the text, “Green Recycling of Michigan is not a 501(c)(3) organization.”

“We’re keeping things from going to landfills. We’re just a recycling company,” said Ali Moussa, operations director for Green Recycling. Including those two in West Toledo, the Detroit-based company operates more than one thousand bins.

The company sends these textiles overseas to “third-world countries,” Moussa said. It rents the space from property owners, marketing it as a “turn-key” funding source for nonprofits with parking lot space to spare.

While absent from the West Toledo bins, the company’s website shows bins marked “help our community,” though it suggests the rent—not the clothing and shoes—stay local.

That kind of ambiguity—or worse, intentional deception—industry-wide hurts the community, Kralovic said.

“People come up to me on a regular basis and they’ll say, ‘Hey, I took some clothes and dropped them off at one of your Goodwill bins,’” Kravolic said. But when he asks the bin’s location, he often realizes it was not one of theirs.

Jim Peniston is the store committee chairman for the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Toledo. When they found their new location on Airport Highway, one of the first things he did was ask the property owner to remove other bins from the parking lot.

“Unless I see a charity name on it, they’re being run by for-profit companies that are taking those materials and turning it into profit and putting that in their pocket,” Peniston said.

“I know what I could do with that stuff” if people donated it to St. Vincent de Paul instead, Peniston said. “That’s upsetting to me.”

Kravolic and others at Goodwill shared their concerns with some Toledo City Council members.

Initially, the discussion focused on possible legislation—but legislation already exists, driven by illegal dumping concerns a decade ago. Toledo law requires bin owners to register with the city, and, unlike the state law, they are required to be a nonprofit corporation.

“I think it is an enforcement issue,” council member At-Large George Sarantou said. “So, like anything, you’ve got to have the personnel, and you’ve got to have the time to go around and enforce that.”

“Anything legal, or asking a property owner to put a bin there, or a permit process, I go through,” Moussa said of his recycling company and its Toledo bins.

Content retrieved from: https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/toledo-area-donation-bins-charity-or-profit-cult-connection/512-b46775cb-a3ad-47cc-93d2-8a26ce2df02f.