Of all the advice we give, the one that saves customers the most money is also the one they are most likely to ignore. A soil and rubble skip should be kept separate from everything else on the job. Not because we are being fussy about sorting, but because a clean inert load and a mixed load are two entirely different things, and around Longton, where the ground is heavy and landscaping projects move a lot of earth, it comes up constantly. Our Longton skip hire service handles a great deal of this.
What counts as inert and why it matters
Inert waste means material that will not break down, will not react and will not leach anything. Soil, subsoil, clay, brick, concrete, block, stone, tile and clean hardcore all qualify. It is the most recoverable category of waste we handle, because crushed clean rubble goes straight back out as usable material and soil can be screened and reused rather than disposed of.
That only works if the load is actually clean. One bag of plaster, a few lengths of timber, some plastic sheeting or a handful of plasterboard offcuts and the whole container stops being an inert load and becomes a mixed one. There is no partial credit. It is either clean or it is not, and a driver looking into a skip of beautiful clean brick rubble with a bin bag sitting on top of it has a mixed load.
So the discipline is worth keeping. Two piles as you work, and a firm word with anyone else on site about which is which.
Why the ground around here makes this worse
Longton sits on the West Lancashire plain, and the soil reflects that. It is deep, fertile and heavy, which is exactly why this has been market gardening country for generations. It also holds water badly and the water table is high, which means anything you dig out between November and March comes up saturated.
The practical effect is that soil here weighs considerably more per barrow than the same volume of soil dug out of a sandy garden nearer the coast. A patio base, a footing trench or a pond excavation produces a load that reaches the weight limit of a skip while looking barely used.
Our page on how full can you fill a skip with soil goes into the numbers, and the honest summary is that a skip taking soil will be full by weight long before it is full by volume, every single time.
The mistake of ordering a bigger skip
This is the part that catches out people who are thinking about it sensibly. Faced with a lot of soil, the instinct is to order the largest container available, and for soil that is usually the wrong move.
Roll on roll off containers are built for bulky light waste. They give you enormous volume, and that is exactly what a strip out or a big site clearance needs. What they cannot do is carry proportionally more weight, because the limit is the vehicle rather than the box. Fill a large container with wet clay and you have a container that cannot legally be lifted, sitting in your driveway, with most of its volume unused.
Our guide on when to upgrade from a builders skip to roll on roll off sets out where the crossover actually sits. For heavy inert material, smaller and more of them is almost always the right answer. A 4 tonne midi skip exchanged twice will move more soil than one oversized container that cannot be shifted.
Separate the topsoil before it goes anywhere
If you are excavating for a patio, a base or a drive, the top three hundred millimetres or so is topsoil and the rest below it is subsoil. They look similar to most people once they are in a heap together, and once they are mixed they are both worth less.
Good topsoil is worth keeping and most gardens have somewhere it can go. Raising a border, levelling a low corner, backfilling elsewhere on the same job. Every barrow you keep is a barrow you are not paying to remove and not paying to replace later. If you do need more than the site produces, we supply screened top soil and can bring it on the same visit as a skip.
Subsoil and clay are a different matter and generally have to go. There is not much useful to be done with wet Lancashire clay in a domestic garden.
Loading a heavy skip properly
Spread it. Heavy material wants to go across the full floor of the skip in an even layer rather than being tipped in at the near end, which is what happens naturally when you are barrowing. An unevenly loaded heavy skip is harder to lift safely and the weight sits wrong on the vehicle.
Break up large pieces of concrete before they go in rather than after. A slab that goes in whole wastes the space around it and cannot be redistributed once it is down there.
Local knowledge and what happens to a clean load
We have been working this part of the plain for a very long time, running Tarleton skip hire and Penwortham skip hire jobs alongside Longton, and our drivers have a good idea of what a given postcode will produce before they arrive. A clean inert load coming back to our own recycling centre gets processed rather than disposed of, which is the whole reason we ask people to keep it separate, and our environmental and recycling page explains what that involves.
Ring us on 01772 364399 before you book if the job is producing soil, and tell us roughly how much and how deep you are going. We will get the size right first time, which on a heavy load is worth far more than it sounds. Our contact page is there if you would prefer to send the details over.
