A “bank” based in Lisbon supports more than 800,000 people, 7% of the Portuguese population, free of charge, with the motto “fetch where there is surplus to distribute where there is lack”, anything but food.
Last year, the Banco de Bens Doados (BBD) supported 2,108 private social solidarity institutions (IPSS), which in turn support more than 800,000 people.
“We end up realizing that the goods we receive here end up reaching 7% of the population, directly or indirectly, and that’s gratifying,” the institution’s general coordinator, Afonso Pinheiro, told Lusa.
Last year around 600 tons of products arrived at BBD, 250 of them electrical and electronic items.
“We receive all kinds of non-food products, from textiles to hygiene and cleaning products, stationery, furniture, and then we also have the Equipment Bank, which is the area where we receive all electrical and electronic products,” says Afonso Pinheiro.
BBD, he explains, also arose from the fight against waste, based on the non-food donations that the Food Bank against Hunger received. It’s a non-food bank, to take advantage of this type of goods and forward them to charities.
In a 4,000 square meter warehouse in Alcântara, Lisbon, which concentrates the two banks (donated goods and equipment), there are cooker hoods, ovens and fridges, mostly new, sewing machines, toasters and coffee machines, tool kits, heaters and fans, vacuum cleaners and hot air fryers.
And then a pile of computers that are four years old and have just arrived, then 421 pallets that arrived in January with new clothes, which are now ready to be distributed. And cleaning products, and hygiene products, and diapers, and toys.
BBD was created within the framework of Entrajuda, an IPSS organization that brings together volunteers to support charities in the fight against poverty.
“Entreajuda’s greatest value is our database. We have more than 5,000 institutions registered throughout the country (…) and we support around 2,000 a year,” explains Afonso Pinheiro, specifying that at the Equipment Bank the team works with all kinds of electrical and electronic products, all of which are sorted, tested, repaired if necessary and updated, and then sent to the IPSS.
Affirming that private individuals and not just companies can donate equipment (or other products), Afonso Pinheiro gives another figure: “last year we delivered 2,000 computers to charities, which then used them for their daily operations or sent them to users”.
A computer that is no longer useful for a manager might be useful for google queries for elderly people in a nursing home, says Afonso Pinheiro.
Eduardo Sousa, a computer engineer, explains that the computers that arrive are first visually sorted. “Anything that’s very old and doesn’t meet the conditions for installing the operating system” goes for recycling, “everything that we can reuse follows another type of process”.
The process, he continues, is to check for anomalies, complete the computer if components are missing, then install the operating system, run tests and license the machine, which is then ready for distribution.
Eduardo Sousa stresses that a computer has a business life cycle of three to four years, but it may not be old enough for non-business use, and recalls the “non-stop year” of the pandemic, when the bank distributed many computers even to schools.
Afonso Pinheiro guarantees that the reuse quotas there are very high.
The bank also receives monitors, mice and keyboards, or, more for private individuals, printers, games consoles and cell phones.
And old pieces, enough for the bank to create a museum, with valve radios, cassette recorders, movie cameras, copies of the first computers like the “Commodore amiga” and the “ZX Spectrum”. The bank will “evolve in the electronics museum and create a virtual museum, where anyone who has a piece of interest can put it up,” says Afonso Pinheiro.
But what the bank essentially receives is new and used equipment, not least because companies, he says, are increasingly concerned with social responsibility and the circular economy.
João Romana, warehouse manager at BBD, points out the containers of detergents, clothes (the Nike brand delivers leftovers from its UK collection there, for example), shoes and home textiles. “What the donors usually give is all new,” he says, pointing to the piles of clothes that have been sorted for distribution to the IPSS this month and in May.
In the 4,000 square meters of Alcântara, the cycle of recovering tons of non-food products, which then go all over the country, begins. But they are also a place where people are recovered, Afonso Pinheiro told Lusa.
Because the BBD is a “gateway to the job market” by receiving volunteers who come from social reintegration, civic work, students who have dropped out of school. And these are people, he says, who “not only learn a trade, but perhaps end up discovering a passion there”.
Afonso Pinheiro has already found his. “Our motto will always be to pick up where there’s plenty, in this case companies, to distribute where there’s not enough, in this case the IPSS and their users.”
