Nonprofit clothes collection company Planet Aid has removed 10 collection bins from the town of Wareham, after the company failed to receive a license from the town and repeatedly violated a new bylaw.

The removal is a victory for Wareham. At 2015’s Annual Town Meeting, voters adopted the a junk bylaw designed to give officials the power to clean up nuisance properties. This is the first time the bylaw has been enforced, and Planet Aid has not contested it.

Planet Aid Chief Operating Officer Fred Olsson said that all Planet Aid boxes had, as far as he knew, been removed from Wareham. He admitted that it was difficult for Planet Aid to keep track of the methods each city used for regulations.

“Each town has their own way of doing ordinances, it gets difficult for us to keep everything straight,” he said.

According to Olsson, at the time that the permits were filed last year, permit application fees were not due at the same time as the permit paperwork. This was changed after the permit application had already been submitted, and was the reason that the Wareham Selectmen denied the licenses, citing “incorrect paperwork.” Calls to the Board of Selectmen and Town Administrator Derek Sullivan for confirmation on this explanation were not returned.

The boxes should originally have been moved months ago, Olsson said, after receiving the letter from the Board of Selectmen which made the company aware that the permit licenses had been denied. “Our people dropped the ball on that and it was completely our fault,” he said.

Olsson plans to refile with Wareham next year, for four or five boxes in different locations. He indicated that they would only file for four or five boxes because of the $100/unit permit application fee. Placing more boxes than that would not necessarily be financially viable. Olson hopes to work with the town in the following years: “We can definitely work with them - we need to do that everywhere.”

The eye-catching yellow Planet Aid boxes have been in Wareham since 2004, and according to Olsson, have collected 300,000 pounds worth of clothes. Planet Aid states on its website that the used clothes are sent to domestic thrift stores or sold overseas as inventory for used-clothing sellers around the world.

Olsson denied that Planet Aid had ever had a similar licensing issue with other towns in the past. In 2013, the company did sue the town of St. Johns, Michigan, after the town banned all outdoor donation boxes. St. John’s called the boxes “public nuisances and eyesores,” and removed Planet Aid’s bins without notification as they passed the ban.

Planet Aid argued that the ordinance violated the nonprofit’s First Amendment rights by infringing on its protected speech of charitable solicitation and giving. Planet Aid won the federal court case, as the federal court found that charitable donation bins were charitable solicitations entitled to strong First Amendment protection, and that the ordinance violated the First Amendment right to free speech.St. Johns appealed the finding, and the federal lawsuit was settled in 2015, when the town repealed the original bylaw and replaced it with a licensing system similar to the the system Wareham has adopted.