This is one of the few articles we write to tell people what we will not do. Japanese knotweed disposal is not a skip job under any circumstances, and putting it in a container is a problem for you, for us and for wherever the load ends up. April is when it appears, which is why it is worth covering now, and if you have it on your ground we would rather explain the position clearly than take a booking we cannot honour. Our Burscough skip hire service covers everything else in the garden.
What it looks like in April
Early spring is the easiest time of year to spot it, because the new growth is distinctive and there is nothing else about at that point to confuse it with.
It comes up as red or purple shoots, thick and blunt, pushing straight out of the ground looking rather like asparagus spears. They grow quickly, and within a few weeks the shoots have opened out into hollow bamboo like canes, often flecked or speckled, carrying broad leaves shaped roughly like a shield or a shovel with a flat base. The leaves come off the stem in a distinctive alternating zigzag pattern rather than in opposite pairs.
By midsummer it will be well above head height. In winter the canes die back to brown hollow sticks that stay standing, so if you have a patch of dead bamboo like canes in a corner that comes back thicker every year, that is worth identifying properly.
Around Burscough it turns up along the canal, on old railway ground, on the edges of yards and on land that has been disturbed or made up at some point. It spreads through its root system rather than by seed here, which is why it appears in lines and expanding clumps rather than scattered about.
Why it cannot go in a skip
Japanese knotweed is classified as controlled waste, and that classification is not a technicality. It has to go to a permitted landfill site that is licensed to take it, and it has to get there through a properly documented route.
A mixed skip does not go to a permitted landfill site. It comes back to our recycling centre, where the whole point of what we do is that material gets sorted, processed and put back into use. Green waste gets composted. Introducing knotweed into that stream is exactly what must not happen, because the material we produce then goes out onto other people’s land.
So we cannot take it, we will not take it, and if a driver identifies it in a load he will decline it. That is not us being awkward. It is the only responsible position.
The soil counts too
This is the part people miss. The visible plant is the smaller half of the problem. The root system spreads well beyond the canes, and a fragment of that root left in soil is enough to establish a new plant.
That means soil dug from anywhere near a stand is contaminated material rather than ordinary spoil, and it has to be treated the same way as the plant itself. Digging out a patch of knotweed and putting the soil in a skip is how it gets moved around, and it is the single most common way it spreads to new sites.
The same applies to anything that has been in contact with it. Never put it in a compost heap, never in a green bin, and never chip it.
What the law expects of you
There is no obligation to eradicate knotweed on your own land. What there is, under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, is an offence of planting or otherwise causing it to grow in the wild, and the practical effect of that is that moving contaminated soil or plant material around is where people get into difficulty.
Separately, allowing it to spread onto a neighbour’s property can give rise to a civil claim, and that is a live area rather than a theoretical one. There are also mortgage and sale implications, because lenders ask about it and buyers’ surveyors look for it.
None of that means panic. It means dealing with it properly rather than quietly.
What to do instead
The two routes are treatment in place or excavation and licensed removal, and for most domestic gardens treatment is the sensible one.
Treatment means a herbicide programme run by a specialist over several growing seasons, with the plant left where it is while it is being killed off. It is slower, it is far cheaper than excavation, and it comes with documentation at the end that matters if you ever sell the property. Cutting it down yourself does not work and can make it worse.
Excavation means a licensed contractor removing the plant and the contaminated soil and taking it to a permitted site with the correct paperwork. That is the fast route and it is expensive, and it is usually reserved for development sites working to a programme.
Either way you want a specialist with the appropriate accreditation, and you want the documentation they produce. Our skip hire duty of care guide explains the general principle that waste has to be traceable, and knotweed is the sharpest example of it.
What we can help with
Everything else in the garden. If you are clearing a plot and there is a knotweed stand in one corner being dealt with by a specialist, the rest of the clearance is ordinary work and our garden waste skip hire service handles it.
What we would ask is that the two are kept properly apart, with a clear working boundary, and that nothing from the treated area finds its way into our container. Our guide to what you can put in a skip covers the wider list of materials we can and cannot accept, and our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip covers the other main exclusions.
Everything we do take comes back to our own recycling centre, which our environmental and recycling page explains, and that is precisely why we are careful about what goes into a container.
Local coverage
We cover Burscough and the surrounding villages daily, including Rufford skip hire and the ground out towards the mosses where old disturbed land is common.
If you think you have it, get it identified before you touch it. Ring us on 01704 779345 if you want to talk through what the rest of the clearance needs, and our contact page is there if you would rather send a photograph of what has come up.
