After more than a hundred years in the waste trade, our team has heard every skip hire and recycling myth going. Some of them are harmless, but others put people off hiring a skip altogether, or worse, lead to waste being handled badly. Because we run our own recycling centre in Burscough, we see exactly what happens to every load we collect, which puts us in a good position to sort the facts from the folklore. Here are the myths we hear most often across West Lancashire, and what actually happens in practice.
Everything in a Skip Ends Up in Landfill
This is the myth we hear more than any other, and it could not be further from how we operate. Every skip we collect comes back to our own facility, where the load is tipped, sorted and separated. Timber, metal, hardcore, soil, cardboard and green waste are all pulled out and sent on for processing or reuse. What ends up in landfill is the genuine residue that has no recovery route, and we work hard to keep that fraction as small as possible. If you want to follow the journey in detail, our guide on what happens to the waste in your skip walks through the whole process, and our Environmental & Recycling page explains why owning the facility matters. When a company controls its own sorting line, recycling is not a marketing claim. It is simply how the business runs. The myth probably survives because plenty of skip firms hire in their tipping from third parties and have no idea what happens after the lorry leaves. We never have to guess. The load our driver collects from your drive in the morning is being sorted by our own people in Burscough that same afternoon, and that visibility is exactly why customers who care about where their waste ends up keep coming back to us.
You Can Throw Anything Into a Skip
The opposite myth is just as common. A skip is for general household, garden and construction waste, but there is a list of materials that must never go in, and the rules are set by law rather than by us. Fridges and freezers, televisions, gas bottles, asbestos, tyres, paint and other hazardous items all need dedicated disposal routes, and a skip containing them cannot be processed normally. When a prohibited item turns up in a load at our facility, it has to be separated and dealt with individually, which slows everything down and can add cost for the customer. Our guide to what you cannot put in a skip and where it goes instead covers the full list with the right alternative for each item. A quick read before you start loading saves an awkward phone call later.
The Biggest Skip Is Always the Best Value
It sounds logical. More space per pound must be better. In reality, the best value skip is the one that matches your waste, and for a large share of the home projects we serve, that is the 4 tonne midi skip rather than anything bigger. Heavy materials complicate the picture further. A skip full of soil or rubble reaches its weight limit long before it looks full, so a bigger skip loaded with heavy waste is often paying for air. Where a larger container earns its keep is on renovation and construction jobs producing bulky mixed waste, which is exactly what the 8 tonne builders skip is designed for. Tell us what the waste actually is and we will point you at the size that costs least overall, not the one that looks most impressive on the drive.
Skips Never Need Paperwork
If your skip sits on your own driveway or garden, no permission is needed from anyone. The myth creeps in when the skip needs to go on the road. Roadside placement always needs a council permit, and hiring without one risks the skip being refused or removed. For our inland towns the application goes to Lancashire County Council as highway authority, while Sefton Council covers Southport and the surrounding borough. We handle the applications for our customers as part of the booking, so the paperwork myth should never put anyone off. The related myth, that a permit takes weeks and endless forms, is equally wrong when your skip company deals with the council routinely. Our article on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire explains the process and the current fee.
Home Recycling Makes a Skip Unnecessary
Kerbside bins are excellent at what they do, but they were never designed for a garden landscaping project, a house clearance or a kitchen strip-out. The green bin will not take a dismantled shed, and no council collection wants a bathroom suite. What a skip adds is capacity and a single sorted destination for the awkward, bulky and mixed waste that home recycling cannot touch. The two systems work together rather than competing. We see this every week in villages like Formby and Ainsdale, where households that recycle diligently still hire a skip for the projects the bins were never meant to handle.
If a skip hire myth has been holding you back, put the question to us directly. Call our team on 01704 779345 or reach us through our contact page and we will give you the honest answer, backed by a recycling centre we run ourselves.
