THIS message is aimed primarily at a certain anonymous dumper of unwanted building rubble, in the desperate hope he can read and still has a conscience. Or at the very least, some shame.

I appeal to you, please, to end your nocturnal visits to the Peaceful Place charity shop in North Avenue, Southchurch.

You have been filling our industrial-sized wheelie-bin with bricks, breeze blocks, concrete slabs and other building materials and you can’t possibly know the distress and inconvenience you are causing.

Volunteers, mostly women, none of them exactly youngsters, leave that bin outside for the weekly disposal of unsaleable items sifted from the small mountain of goods kindhearted folk deliver to the shop for sale.

Is it not meant to take the kind of heavy and non-recyclable building material left by our unthinking, uncaring, nightime visitor – or visitors, possibly.

After struggling to manhandle the illegally overloaded container, the shop’s binmen have said enough is enough.

They have given the shop’s volunteers a choice – remove the rubble, or face the prospect of no more collections.

The charity shop has no paid staff and has no expenses besides its rent, rates and bin hire. It raises welcome sums for Peaceful Place, a local charity which cares for – and about – sufferers of early-onset dementia. A year’s proceeds from the shop recently funded much of the cost of a new, specially-adapted minibus to take clients between their homes and a Rochford day centre and on eagerly-anticipated outings to the countryside.

In time, yet more hard-earned money will help make a dream come true by funding a purpose-built respite care home.

This will all be due to the efforts of the volunteers and of those who donate clothes, books, household goods and money.

These people of course, are the wonderful majority in our society. The carers and the sharers.

Thankfully, such folk vastly outnumber the spoilers, the cheats, and uncaring people like our rubble-dumpers.

If you’re reading this, I urge you: Have a heart – please. Leave our bin alone.