The flat ground around Tarleton has been growing under glass for generations, and there are still a great many old glasshouses standing on holdings and in large gardens across the area. When one finally comes down, horticultural glass disposal turns out to be a considerably more careful job than most people expect, and it is one where rushing causes injuries. Our Tarleton skip hire service takes a steady flow of these, mostly in the weeks before the growing season starts.
Why horticultural glass is different
The glass in an old commercial or garden glasshouse is not the toughened glass you get in a modern greenhouse or a car window. Toughened glass is designed to break into small blunt cubes. Horticultural glass is plain float glass, often thin, and it breaks into long curved shards with edges like a blade.
That is the whole safety issue in one sentence. A pane that slips out of a rebate and shatters on a concrete path throws pieces a surprising distance, and the ones that land in grass are still there weeks later waiting for somebody in wellingtons.
Old glass is also more brittle than new glass. Decades of frost, heat and settlement mean a good proportion of the panes in a neglected glasshouse are already cracked and only being held in place by the putty and the clips.
Taking it apart in the right order
Glass off first, frame after. Always. Pulling a frame apart with glass still in it is how people get badly hurt, and it makes the glass unusable and unmanageable in one move.
Work from the top down and from one end along. Take out the clips, ease each pane rather than levering it, and have somewhere immediately to put it. Stack panes on edge in a wooden crate or against a wall on a timber batten, never flat in a pile where the weight of the stack cracks the bottom sheets.
Old putty is the thing that slows everything down. Where panes are bedded in hard putty rather than clipped, they will not simply lift out, and forcing them breaks them. Hacking the putty out carefully is tedious and it is faster than dealing with the consequences of impatience.
Gloves that are actually cut resistant, long sleeves, eye protection and proper boots. Not gardening gloves.
Getting it into the skip safely
We will take glass, and we would ask you to think about the person at the other end as well as yourself.
Broken glass wants containing rather than loose. A rubble sack with the glass inside and the top tied, or an old crate, means the load can be handled without anybody putting a hand into it blind. Loose broken glass scattered through a mixed skip is a genuine hazard for our drivers and for the people sorting the load at our site.
Whole panes that are being disposed of rather than saved are best broken deliberately, inside a container, with something over the top of it, rather than being carried across a yard intact and dropped.
One thing worth saying plainly. This glass does not go in a bottle bank. Glass recycling for containers is a different stream entirely and window and horticultural glass contaminates it, so the answer is a skip rather than the local bottle bank.
What else comes out of an old glasshouse
The frame is usually timber or steel, occasionally aluminium in later ones. Timber frames from a glasshouse of any age have generally been treated, and treated timber should not be burned, which our guide to what you can put in a skip covers alongside the other materials in question.
Then there is everything inside. Staging, pots, old growing media, hoses, heaters and the accumulated contents of decades. Spent compost and plant material are green waste and worth keeping separate, and our garden waste skip hire service handles that side.
Old heaters, chemicals and treatments need pulling out and dealing with separately. Our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip explains where that goes.
If the glasshouse sat on a brick or concrete base that is also coming out, that is heavy inert waste and worth keeping apart from the rest, because clean rubble gets crushed and recovered while mixed waste does not. Our environmental and recycling page explains the difference.
Sizing and siting the skip
Glass is heavy for its volume and the frame is bulky, so a full glasshouse strip usually wants an 8 tonne builders skip. If the base is coming up as well, talk to us about a second container rather than trying to fit everything into one.
Put the skip as close to the structure as the access allows. Carrying glass any distance is the part of this job where things go wrong, and every metre saved is worth having. On a holding, a hardstanding yard is a far better drop point in February than a field gateway.
Local coverage
We know this stretch of the plain well, running Longton skip hire and Hesketh Bank skip hire jobs alongside Tarleton, and our drivers are used to the lanes and the access out here.
Ring us on 01772 364399 before you start rather than after, and tell us the size of the structure. Our contact page is there if you would rather send a photograph of what you are dealing with.
