Drop a skip on the drive and it is easy to assume everything in it is heading for landfill. The reality, at least with us, is close to the opposite. A large share of what we collect is sorted and recovered at our own recycling centre, and some of what comes back out of a skip surprises people who expected it to be buried and forgotten. This is what actually happens to the materials you load in, and why so little of a typical skip ends up as waste in the end.
What we recover from a skip and where it goes
Once a skip reaches our recycling centre it is not simply tipped into a hole. It is sorted, by hand and by machine, into separate streams that each have a route back into use. The aim is to pull out everything that can be recovered before anything is sent for final disposal, which is both better for the environment and a large part of how we keep our pricing sensible. You can read the wider picture of how we operate on our environmental and recycling page, but the detail of what happens to particular materials is where it gets interesting.
Rubble, soil, and hardcore become new ground
The heaviest material in a skip is often the most recoverable. Broken concrete, brick, and hardcore are crushed down into recycled aggregate, which goes back into sub-bases for driveways, roads, and foundations rather than being quarried fresh from the ground. Clean soil is screened and reused as fill. It is one of the reasons we ask people to keep inert material like this separate where they can, since a clean load of rubble recycles far more easily, and more cheaply, than the same material mixed in with general rubbish. Much of this comes off the back of building work, which is exactly what our builders skip hire is geared up for.
Old timber gets a second life
Timber rarely needs to be wasted. Old floorboards, joists, pallets, and broken furniture frames are chipped and graded, then used in the manufacture of chipboard and other panel products, as biomass fuel, or processed into animal bedding and landscaping mulch. A skip full of a stripped-out kitchen or a dismantled shed holds a lot more recoverable timber than most people would guess.
Metal almost never goes to waste
Metal is the one material that can be recycled over and over without losing its quality, so it is always worth recovering. We extract both the heavy ferrous metal such as old radiators and steel offcuts and the lighter non-ferrous metals like copper and aluminium, and these go on to be melted down and made into new products. Even the small bits, the brackets, pipes, and fixings buried in a renovation load, are pulled out and kept in the stream.
Plasterboard has to go its own way
Plasterboard is the one that catches people out. Because of the gypsum it contains, it cannot legally be sent to landfill mixed in with general waste, and it needs to be kept separate so it can be recycled properly. Recovered gypsum is processed back into new plasterboard, closing the loop almost completely. If you have a lot of it coming out of a refit, telling us in advance and keeping it apart from the rest of the load makes the whole job cleaner and cheaper, and our guide to what you can put in a skip sets out the materials that need this kind of handling.
Cardboard, paper, and plastics
The lighter end of a household or office load is easy to recover too. Cardboard and paper are baled and sent for pulping into new packaging, and many of the harder plastics are sorted and reprocessed rather than dumped. The cleaner these arrive, free of food waste and other contamination, the more of them can be saved, which is why a quick sort before loading pays off.
Garden and green waste turns back into soil
Soil, turf, branches, hedge trimmings, and grass all compost down into usable material rather than taking up space in the ground. A garden clearance is one of the most recoverable loads we handle, and almost none of it needs to be treated as waste. Our garden waste skip hire keeps that material in its own stream so it goes straight to composting.
How you can help us recover more
Most of the work happens at our end, but a little care at yours makes a real difference to how much is recovered. Keeping heavy rubble, plasterboard, and clean green waste in separate piles where you can, and keeping hazardous items out of the skip altogether, means more of the load can be saved and less has to be sorted out the hard way. If you want a fuller picture of the journey, our page on what happens to the waste in your skip follows a load from collection through to its final destination.
Talk to us about your next skip
If it matters to you that your waste is recovered rather than buried, you are booking with the right people. Call the team on 01704 779345 or get in touch through our contact us page, and we will sort the right skip for the job and make sure as much of what you load goes back into use as possible.
