What rubbish does your council charge for?

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Geoff_S

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Epsom & Ewell used to be nothing was charged for.

And gradually we got charged for rubble, plasterboard & tyres. Plasterboard actually costs more to dispose of than it costs to buy!
Then they started on garden timbers, fences & sheds and the like.

And in June they are now going to extend that to ANY wood!

A single piece of wood is £4.00. A loose car load, whatever that is is £50.00!

£50.00 !!! :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

So essentially, they are charging for stuff that can be recycled, but landfill is free!

No doubt next year they will start on metals as well.

So what are other councils like?
 
Redbridge Council considers harcore, rubble, wood, etc. 'restricted items'. You have a set number of visits/weight you can dispose of for free in the recycling centre. After that, you have to visit a commercial recycling centre (like traders).
It wouldn't surprise me if they started charging. They should be encouraging MORE of it, not less.
Lot's of private companies involved in Redbridge recycling - probably creaming any profit from anything recycled, plus charging the council.
 
Not hard to work out why fly tipping is on the increase, according to recent headlines.....

As for our local council everything is free, no matter private individual or plasterer or plumber etc. Indeed, compost generated by waste food and garden refuse is also free by the bag or trailer load.
 
We don't get charged but they do restrict certain item at the local tip meaning you have to take a long trip across town. I just bag it so they can't see what it is. To be fair, I rarely visit the tip, I have a reciprocating saw and a large brown bin, very rare I can't get something to fit in there.
 
We get charged now for rubble, plasterboard, tyres and maybe one or two other things, but not for general rubbish, wood or green waste.The thing that peeves me is that they call it a recycling depot, but you are not allowed to recycle anything from it. I dumped a load one day and next to me was a transit flatbed loaded to gunwales with 4' or 5' lengths of 10" - 12" leylandii which I wasn't allowed to take (I don't doubt for a moment a staff member had it at closing time). They wouldn't now allow the truck in, though.
An acquaintance about 25 years ago worked in Plymouth - his wife cut my grandmother's hair - and he used to keep the old people she knew supplied with firewood as they weren't allowed to dump it then.
We live less than a mile from the dump and the scrap merchants so we don't have a problem - we couldn't get the washing machine in the car so I said to just stick it at the end of the drive with a "please take" notice on it. It was there for bout ten days hen a guy picking up scrap radiators own the road saw and had it. Anything remotely useful I've just stuck it outside with a notice on it and it's always gone in a day or two. You wouldn't believe the amount of stuff fly tipped within a couple of hundred yards of the dump.
 
I work for a large commercial recycling centre in South Essex. Our local Civic centres have stopped anybody entering if they have any type of commercial vehicle, even if it’s a small Corsa van!! Which in turn sends them to us, but they have to have a waste carrier license and also have to pay a charge depending on the waste stream , so fly tips are definitely on the rise in my area. Then my firm charges the council to go and clear the fly tipped waste. :shock:
 
Forgot to say - Redbridge introduced charging people for green waste - meaning leaves and twigs. It wasn't cheap. After some mild protest, they scrapped the charge.

Classic case of losing sight of the point of waste management...
 
I remember the days of going to sharston tip where all the gypsies and nutters went to get free wood and load their vans up full of it, luckily near me there are no charges that I know of.
 
My local council run tip are a nightmare. I have a van for work and am not even allowed through the entrance gate in it.....there is also a height restriction, not necessarily for commercial vehicles!

If I want to dispose of some bags of garden waste and cuttings from my own garden, I am not too happy about piling them up in the back of the car, so logically, I would put them in my van and take them down the tip, but i have to park 20 yards from the tip entrance and carry each individual bag through the gate and tip them in the garden waste recycling bin.

From a commercial point of view, I often have to remove old plasterboard ceilings and replace with a new one as part of a new Kitchen project. Disposing of the old plasterboard is a PITA...!!! I am not allowed to put it in the skip along with the rest of the rubbish generated. It has to be kept separate and I have to take it personally to my skip companies depot where they weigh me in, I have to dump it in a special space myself, they then weigh me again .......and still charge me for a minimum of 1000kg, no matter whether I have 80, 100, 200, or 500 kg....its still charged as a 1000kg.......

When I explain this to my clients, and then tell them that the cost of the materials to put a new ceiling up is less than 1/3rd of the price to dispose of the old materials, they are dumbfounded. What makes it even harder to swallow is the fact that the reason plasterboard cannot be dumped along with all the other waste materials is, that they state it because of the Gypsum in the plasterboard causing some sort of chemical reaction in the ground with other waste products.......The irony that Gypsum is a naturally occurring material that is dug up out of the ground originally seems to be lost on the powers that be.....

Rant over...!!
 
Distinterior":212vspnj said:
My local council run tip are a nightmare. I have a van for work and am not even allowed through the entrance gate in it.....there is also a height restriction, not necessarily for commercial vehicles!

If I want to dispose of some bags of garden waste and cuttings from my own garden, I am not too happy about piling them up in the back of the car, so logically, I would put them in my van and take them down the tip, but i have to park 20 yards from the tip entrance and carry each individual bag through the gate and tip them in the garden waste recycling bin.

From a commercial point of view, I often have to remove old plasterboard ceilings and replace with a new one as part of a new Kitchen project. Disposing of the old plasterboard is a PITA...!!! I am not allowed to put it in the skip along with the rest of the rubbish generated. It has to be kept separate and I have to take it personally to my skip companies depot where they weigh me in, I have to dump it in a special space myself, they then weigh me again .......and still charge me for a minimum of 1000kg, no matter whether I have 80, 100, 200, or 500 kg....its still charged as a 1000kg.......

When I explain this to my clients, and then tell them that the cost of the materials to put a new ceiling up is less than 1/3rd of the price to dispose of the old materials, they are dumbfounded. What makes it even harder to swallow is the fact that the reason plasterboard cannot be dumped along with all the other waste materials is, that they state it because of the Gypsum in the plasterboard causing some sort of chemical reaction in the ground with other waste products.......The irony that Gypsum is a naturally occurring material that is dug up out of the ground originally seems to be lost on the powers that be.....

Rant over...!!

Yes, the plasterboard. Is it the new asbestos or something? Why the hell does it cost so much to get rid of it? There was a time it was just put with the rubble.

By the way, what does 1000kg cost where you are? I got caught with that a few years back, with a trailer attached to my car. It had never been a problem for years, but then it was. I cannot forget that back then, pre 2005, it was £70. I stopped using a trailer after that and just bagged it.
 
£94 = or < 1000kg + Vat,.....and that is the Trade cost of disposal. I get a better rate than Joe Public coz i order Skips from the same company regularly. I usually make the trip over to them 3 or 4 times a year for plasterboard disposal. If I have 2 consecutive jobs that are both going to need new ceilings, I store the first load until I can dump both loads at the same time. It gets messy though if you leave it out in the rain + the fact that it then weighs more coz its wet....!!! By the time I've loaded up, driven to the depot, dumped the plasterboard, driven back to the job, it's usually an hour or 2 wasted and I have to build that wasted time into the overall cost of the project.

So, £30 odd for all the materials for a new ceiling, and in reality the cost of removal, disposal and my time to dispose of the old plasterboard, is 5 times as much......and some Clients wonder why the overall cost is much more than they had anticipated.....

Just as ironic, is the fact that a lot of the local Council tips around my way, will still allow Joe Public to dispose of his own plasterboard in bags out of the back of his own car..... (hammer)
 
......And,...Whilst I'm on my soapbox, another thing that really p i s s e s me off is rubbish removal at my Showroom/Workshop.
I pay a very significant amount of money every year in Business Rates, far, far more than I pay in Domestic Rates for my house, and what do I get from the Local Authority for all that money I pay...? Sweet FA..! They don't have a rubbish collection that even comes once or twice a month as you normally get at home. I have to pay extra to dispose of that waste as well.....
 
Geoff_S":2p381we7 said:
Epsom & Ewell used to be nothing was charged for.

And gradually we got charged for rubble, plasterboard & tyres. Plasterboard actually costs more to dispose of than it costs to buy!
Then they started on garden timbers, fences & sheds and the like.

And in June they are now going to extend that to ANY wood!

A single piece of wood is £4.00. A loose car load, whatever that is is £50.00!

£50.00 !!! :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

So essentially, they are charging for stuff that can be recycled, but landfill is free!

No doubt next year they will start on metals as well.

So what are other councils like?


I have to admit - I'm shocked by that. Where's the incentive to recycle? Just a money making scheme I bet. People won't pay that. Surely Epsom have recycling targets to meet and will be fined if they don't achieve them? Fly tipping coasts an absolute fortune to clean up.

Merton don't charge for anything for the regular public. Still have an increase in fly tipping though. Reported a load of asbestos in the street just last week.
 
Waverley (SW Surrey) is planning to start charging for wood also. There was a survey that went out that I responded to (doubt it will make any difference). If they won't take wood for recycling, I am not going to pay to dump it. I will just burn it in my garden incinerator irritating all the neighbours and pumping out a load of pollution in the process... Seems daft to me.
 
Ours charge £45 a year for the garden waste bin. So most people chuck their grass clippings in the black landfill bin... Madness. I take mine in my van every couple of weeks, I've got a permit that lets me take my van to the tip 12 times in a 24 month span but luckily the guys there never mark off when I go in. Plasterboard and rubble gets fed into the black bin over a couple of weeks, they've had some real backbreakers to deal with in the past! :lol:
 
Down here in Cornwall, the charges are

Asbestos £10.30 per sheet or bag

Plasterboard £4.50 per bag

Tyres £3.30 per tyre

Soil/rubble £1.80 per small sack (small rubble sack)
Including bricks, breeze blocks, concrete, drainage pipes (ceramic/porcelain), gravel, hardcore, paving slabs, rubble, sand, sanitary ware (ceramic/porcelain toilets, bidets, sinks, shower trays, pipes, etc), soil, slates/slabs, stones, tarmac, tiles (ceramic, porcelain, floor, roof, wall) and turf

Other wood / green waste / household waste is okay to tip

But we cannot enter the site on foot, plus they close the site every five minutes to move lorries or skips, so the queue in the road can often stretch hundreds of yards up the road, which effectively blocks the road as some won't pass the queue to move on

And they wonder why fly tipping is on the increase, its everywhere blighting the countryside and lanes

So we report it and end up footing the bill through our council tax, ludicrous isn't it
 

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