Hospitality refurbishes in February for the obvious reason. Trade is at its slowest, closing for a fortnight costs less than it would at any other point in the year, and everything needs to be finished before the weather turns and people start going out again. Restaurant refit waste is one of the more varied loads we handle, and several parts of it cannot simply go in a skip. Our Chorley skip hire service supports a run of these every year.
The kitchen produces most of it
Front of house is mostly light and bulky. Fixed seating, tables, partitions, flooring, light fittings and decorative work. It takes room and it does not weigh a great deal.
The kitchen is where the difficult material is. Stainless steel benching, sinks, shelving and canopies come out in quantity, and stainless has a genuine scrap value. It is worth separating rather than filling a skip with it, and any decent strip out contractor will already be doing that. If yours is not, it is a fair question to ask.
Extraction ducting is the item that catches people out. Ductwork from a commercial kitchen that has been running for years is coated internally with grease deposits, and that makes it contaminated waste rather than clean metal. It cannot go into a general load and be treated as recoverable steel. Flag it when you book so we can advise rather than having a driver decline it on the day.
Refrigeration needs a qualified person
This is the one where getting it wrong has consequences. Commercial refrigeration, walk in cold rooms, under counter units, display cabinets and ice machines all contain refrigerant gases, and those gases have to be recovered by a suitably qualified engineer before the unit is scrapped.
You cannot put a commercial fridge in a skip, and you should not let anyone remove one who cannot tell you how the gas is being handled. We will not take them, and that is not us being awkward. The recovery has to be documented, and the unit only becomes ordinary scrap once it has been done.
Arrange that as a separate strand of the project, ideally before the strip out starts, so the units are dealt with rather than standing in a yard for a fortnight. Our guide to how to dispose of electrical waste responsibly covers the wider electrical side of a strip out.
Flooring, oils and the other awkward items
Commercial kitchen flooring is usually safety vinyl welded at the seams and coved up the walls, or quarry tile bedded solidly. Vinyl comes up in sheets and is bulky. Quarry tile and its bed are dense and heavy, and lifting a full kitchen floor produces a serious tonnage from a small area.
Waste cooking oil is not skip waste under any circumstances and needs its own collection. The same goes for cleaning chemicals, and there are usually more of those in a commercial kitchen than anybody remembers. Our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip covers where these things go.
Any plasterboard from partition removal or reboarding has to be kept separate from the general load, which our page on plasterboard disposal and building waste separation explains.
Duty of care and why the paperwork matters commercially
Waste from a business premises is controlled waste, and the business carries a duty of care over it that does not end when the skip leaves. That means a registered carrier, a waste transfer note for every collection, and keeping those notes.
Our skip hire duty of care guide sets out what should be on the paperwork. For a hospitality business there is a second reason to care about it beyond the legal one, which is that environmental health and licensing conversations go considerably better when your waste documentation is in order.
Sizing and scheduling around a closed period
The constraint on a refit is almost never the volume of waste. It is that the whole job has to happen inside a fixed closure and the skip cannot become the bottleneck.
What works is a container on site for the strip out, exchanged promptly rather than when somebody remembers, and a second phase for the fit out waste. An 8 tonne builders skip covers most single unit refits, and where the premises are larger our commercial skip hire service handles bigger containers and a planned exchange schedule.
Tell us the closure dates when you book and we will work to them. A skip sitting full over a weekend in the middle of a two week closure costs you more than the exchange would have.
Access in a town centre
Chorley town centre brings the usual constraints. Loading restrictions, pedestrianised stretches, limited kerb space and neighbouring businesses who are still trading while you are not. Early morning deliveries and collections are usually the answer, and where the skip has to sit on the highway it needs a permit from Lancashire County Council as highway authority at £36 per month, covered in our guide on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire.
Everything we collect comes back to our own recycling centre for sorting, which our environmental and recycling page explains.
Ring us on 01257 752399 with your closure dates and a rough scope, and we will build a schedule around it rather than leaving you to chase collections. Our contact page is there for anything you would rather put in writing.
