Thinking of de-cluttering your home? Maybe you’re going to do a big spring clean this year? Either way, it is always surprising how much stuff you can accumulate over the year that you just don’t need anymore. When you do decide to do the big clean, it might be worth considering hiring a skip to take away any unnecessary stress of how to dispose of your things. Well, before you pick up the phone to get rid of that pesky clutter/rubbish, it’s worth knowing what you actually can and can’t put in a skip. Now that we are a nation trying to become more eco-friendly there are a few things worth knowing when it comes to skip hire. It’s fantastic that recycling has become something that the majority of us do now without really thinking about it. Whether it is simply separating our paper from our plastics or adding waste to the compost heap, it all helps to make the world greener. 

There was a time when you were able to hire a skip and throw whatever you want inside, regardless of what it was, but thankfully this has now changed. It was easier back then, we know, but knowing how much better for the environment this is makes it easier to accept.

First things first, you need to know what kind of skip you wish to hire, not just the size but the type. For example, you may wish to hire a plastic skip or a wood skip as you wouldn’t be able to combine these two different materials. Depending on what type of material you are getting rid would also affect the price of hire. This is because certain things are cheaper to recycle than others. Some of the cheapest to recycle being paper and plastic.

If you are lucky you may have some scrap metal you need getting rid of. If that’s the case then, as metal has value, the price of this would actually come out of the skip hire cost, depending on how much you have depends on how profitable you could be. Maybe it’s worth just double checking the back garden again?

Although skip’s can, of course, take the majority of items away for you, there are a few things that are unfortunately prohibited –

• Fridges
• Microwaves
• Solvents
• Television
• Toasters
• Telephones
• Tyres
• Vehicle and household batteries
• Electrical equipment such as electric cookers
• Asbestos
• Compressed Gas Cylinders
• Explosives
• Medical Waste
• Oils
• Chemicals
• Paint Tins

If after reading this you are still a little unsure on what kind of skip you need then please remember you can always give us a call. Our highly trained and friendly team are always happy to answer any questions you might have.

Please feel free to contact us on 1890 40 10 20 or alternatively by clicking here.

Before hiring a skip you need to be realistic in your calculations, it is important to know how to get the best out of it so you don’t have to hire another one and incur extra charges. Make sure that you get one that is big enough to rid you of your intended waste with room for extra space just in case.

The first thing to remember is to segregate your waste. The mistake most people make is to just add on anything and everything, the trick is to pile everything up in layers. First debris, start by filling the skip with lighter and smaller debris as this helps compact the smaller items once you start adding bigger and heavier items in. Bulky items should also be broken down into smaller parts if possible; this allows you to get the most out of the space available.

Lastly, make sure that you do not over-fill the skip, doing so might cause health and safety concerns like endangering road users or yourself during transportation. If you skip is overfilled you run the risk of the driver not collecting it until it has been reorganised, if this happens you might be required to pay additional charges and it will also waste your time.

It is also worth remembering that if you have a range of different materials to throw away you might need to arrange for a skip that allows for mixed materials.

Some safety tips to remember – Keep kids and pets away from the skip area, keep a clear path to the skip to avoid tripping over while moving around, do not try to lift heavy objects alone and lastly you should protect yourself from the dust that might arise from the skip with any type of dust mask.

If you’d like to find out more about our waste management services,  please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Call us on 1890 401020 or fill out our online contact form right here! We look forward to hearing from you.

With the world having limited space to offer up for landfill sites, recycling and composting have become more and more popular in the modern day. Why? Because they reduce the volume of rubbish that need disposal in these landfill sites, and save you money by producing rich soil that you can use on your own garden.

What is composting?

Composting is a natural process of recycling decomposed organic material, turning it into rich soil (compost) which can be particularly handy for any keen gardeners out there.

Not only can we do it ourselves from the comfort of our back garden, but this way, the composting process will be accelerated, bringing you nutrient-rich soil for your garden and your plants in far quicker time.

What should you compost?

So, what do you put in your compost pile to make compost? What is this ‘organic material’ we speak of? Well, it’s all that garden waste like leaves, weeds, and grass clippings, as well as certain scraps and waste from your kitchen too. Fruit and vegetable scraps and peel, coffee grounds, teabags and egg shells can all be composted, for example.

With that long list, it may come as no surprise to learn that garden and food waste make up a significant amount of what we throw away as a population. This is why it doesn’t make sense for us to use up resources to get rid of it all, when we simply don’t need to!

What is surprising is just how useful these old scraps and leftovers can be to you, as well as the environment. If you get your compost right – by putting in the good stuff and avoiding the bad – you can get a finished product of dark-brown crumbly soil that your garden and plants will thrive off.

How to make your own compost heap

Have we convinced you? We thought we might, so we’re going to go through how you can make your own compost heap to help you on your way to saving the environment bit by bit!

• First up, buy a compost bin or build one yourself. Try and make sure that your compost pile will be enclosed to keep away any critters and hold the heat and moisture in, as well as look neat and tidy in your garden too.
• If you live in a city or urban area, it will be necessary for you to have secure flooring and covering beneath it and on top of it, as well as no wide openings.
• Set up your bin in shaded area that is convenient to you, and somewhere with good drainage to improve the quality of the compost.
• For the best quality finished product, you want to make sure your compost has a good balance of ‘green’ and ‘brown’ materials, and give it a good airing. One top tip to keep your compost healthy is to layer it, and add scrunched up pieces of cardboard to create air pockets.
• You’ll know your compost is ready when you have a dark-brown, almost black, soil that has a sponge-like texture. This shows it is rich in nutrients, and ready to spread over your flowerbeds!

The family present cupboard

This cupboard will save you time, effort and money. If you don’t have a present cupboard, simply clear some room at the back of your wardrobe and make sure your kids can’t get to it. Not only is it a place to keep unwanted gifts, but it becomes a great resource for last minute presents.

If you’re going to re-gift your unwanted presents, however, you will have to be aware of the serious potential problem of giving someone the gift they gave you. You should also ensure that any gifts you pass on aren’t personalised in any way.

Sell your gifts on

Another option you have is to list your unwanted presents online, although sites such as eBay become full of listings of similar bad presents, so don’t expect to make too much money on them.

Donate your gifts

Donating your gifts to a community or school raffle, or donating them to a charity shop is a far more honourable way to  get rid of unwanted gifts. You won’t make any money from it, but you’ll be helping a good cause and in the case of donating them to a charity shop, you can at least feel warm at the fact that the person who does buy your unwanted gifts will love and cherish them.

Take the gift back to the shop

If the gift-giver has included a gift receipt, you can always return the gift to the shop from where it was bought. If you have no such receipt, some stores will offer a credit note around this time of year. Unfortunately, you will most likely need a receipt to return it, and if you don’t have it you’d need to admit that you didn’t like the present.

Accept the gift

Of course, the last option is to quietly accept and use the gift you were given. Whilst you may hate the celebrity-endorsed, cheap perfume or ugly Christmas sweater, someone has thought enough of you to buy you something at this expensive time of year. Seeing them happy as you use or wear their gift will always more than make up for the fact that you have a slightly undersized Primark onesie you’ll never wear again.

Animals

We hope that no one would consider knowingly throw an animal in the rubbish, but feral cats sometimes use skips and bins to birth kittens or shelter. This means that occasionally, they can end up getting transported to landfills, where they’re sometimes adopted by the landfill workers.

Bombs

Workers at a landfill site in Nuneaton once found a live grenade in a skip, leading to a large scale evacuation of the area whilst a bomb disposal unit dealt with it. Whilst working in a landfill is a dangerous job, we don’t think explosives should be included!

Cars

Some people don’t want to pay the disposal fees charged by scrap yards, so they manage to get their cars to landfill sites instead. Cars have even been found in skips, which makes us wonder how they managed it in the first place. There are far easier ways to dispose of cars, after all.

Money

When elderly relatives die or are moved into a nursing home, relatives will often clear the house out, throwing away furniture and old mattresses. All these things have been found in landfills, hiding thousands of Euros, Dollars and Pounds in cash.

Bridesmaid and wedding dresses

There are a few reasons why a wedding or bridesmaid’s dress may end up on a landfill site, but these expensive dresses are spotted relatively often.

Collectors’ items

Unless you’re a collector of a specific item, you may not know it’s true worth, leading you to throw away something potentially worth tens of thousands of Euros. Landfill workers regularly find priceless books, magazines, coins and toys that could bring in huge amounts of money.

Sensitive data

In today’s data-reliant world, data theft is a serious problem. Landfills are home to a variety of unwanted CVs, payslips, contact details and even old computers holding sensitive information. If you’re looking to replace your IT system, it’s important to find a reputable and confidential waste disposal service.

Police evidence

Even the police will mistakenly throw things away. In America, one police force threw away potentially vital evidence from an open case.

The reason why plastic bags are so bad is that they’re not bio-degradable. They can’t rot and become part of the eco system. Combined with the CO2 emissions caused from their manufacture, reducing your plastic bag usage will provide great benefits for the environment.

Here are some easy ways you can cut down your carrier bag use

Use reusable bags

Investing in reusable bags is an easy start to make and one of the best ways to not only decrease your plastic bag use, but to eliminate it entirely.

Reusable bags aren’t often made of plastic and are a lot stronger than regular bags.  This means that they’re ultimately better value and can hold far more. This method will only work if you remember to take them with you every time you go shopping, so always keep them in a place where you’ll remember them.

Reuse your current carrier bags

We all have numerous plastic bags we’ve collected over the years lurking somewhere in our kitchen. The next time you go shopping, why not bring some of these bags with you to reuse, rather than using new plastic bags? As long as there are no holes in the current bags and their handles are in tact, you can get many uses out of the same carrier bag.

Return them to your supermarket

If your supermarket offers home delivery, they may also collect your old, unwanted carrier bags. They’re often used for other home deliveries, and are a great resource for the supermarket, as it then has to spend less money on new bags.

As we can’t avoid the bag charge, we need to be able to readjust and reassess the way we live our lives. Whilst the charge is a small amount, spending money on bags that contain a family’s weekly shop will soon add up to a hefty amount.

By making small adjustments, such as cutting down on the amount of plastic bags we use, we not only save a significant amount of money, but can have a positive effect on the environment.

Think about what you would replace if you lost everything

Take yourself to a place away from your home and ask yourself what you would replace immediately if you lost everything in a house fire. It’s important to do this away from home, so you don’t get caught up with the clutter you’re trying to discard. You don’t need to go into models or brands of items, just write down everything you remember. This list will become the basis of the home items that are important and valuable.

Make de-cluttering a series of sprints, not one marathon

You won’t be able to clear out your entire home or apartment in a day, or even a weekend, so there’s not much point in trying. Just how it took you time to accumulate your clutter, it will take time to get rid of it too. Make a plan and target specific areas to declutter and clean up over a longer period of time, and stick to it. This way, you won’t exhaust yourself.

Try decluttering one room at a time in bursts of around half an hour before taking a break. This could easily be done on a Saturday afternoon, alternating half an hour of decluttering with half an hour of relaxing. This way, you can avoid frustration and boredom of the task, as well as the high emotions of decided which possessions to get rid of. Make sure you reward yourself with something when you take breaks.

Think of practicality first and sentimentality second

Getting attached to things is extremely easy, due to having them for a long time or the circumstances in which you acquired them. These feelings are entirely natural, so you’ll have to actively detach yourself when decluttering your home. The following questions will help you evaluate whether or not you should keep something:

• Does this item help me in a way that nothing else does?
• Does anything else I have do the job just as well or even better?
• Does this have a sentimental meaning to me?

Sentimental value is still important, so don’t entirely overlook it as a reason to keep something.

Use the Four Box method

The four box method asks you to sort everything into four categories: keep, store, donate and throw away.

• Keep the items you need and use regularly.
• Store items that you can’t bear to donate, but don’t use regularly either. This is the most ambiguous category and most likely to be used for sentimental items.
• Donate items that you don’t need or use regularly, but may be of use to someone else.
• Throw away items such as broken items, useless items and old paperwork that’s no longer needed.

Change your habits

Once you’ve decluttered your home, ask yourself some questions before you buy anything new, such as where will you put it, and what will you need to get rid of to make room for it. Do you already have an item that does the job just as well or better at home? Finally, will this new item have sentimental value? By being mindful when bringing new items into the home, you can make sure you only bring items you both need and love.

And we know why.

It’s difficult going from physical sheets of paper, to relying on everything digitised.

To help you make the transition, we’ve put together a few tips.

Digitise what you have

All the documents you currently have in the office, or you find yourself printing off often (health and safety documents, new starter information etc…) should all be digitised and stored in a company shared cloud service.

This way, you never have to print the items off again. Just direct employees to your cloud account where everything is stored.

Lose the printer

Office workers will be tempted to carry on printing paper as normal. The solution?

It’s a simple one – don’t give them access to it. Limit access to the printer to a select few members of your ‘paperless’ team, and if anyone wants to print, they have to have permission.

Get meeting tablets

We most often need sheets of paper and documents in front of us for when we’re in a meeting. We need to have information to hand in a quick glance.

So purchase a small amount of tablets to be used in meetings. Then you don’t have to print, and you can grab all the info you need there and then.

Reward

To encourage employees to adopt the paperless approach, you need to offer rewards. You could run a competition for the employee who’s made the most adjustments.

Create an atmosphere where using paper is frowned upon. Go green. Be paperless.

Use the right tools

There are a number of tools on the web designed to help you go paperless. Our two favourites are Evernote and Slack.

The former is a digital notebook tool that you can clip details into, tag them, and then organise them. It makes keeping track of everything really, really easy.

Slack is a communication tool allowing you to seamlessly discuss projects with other people in the office without ever having to print a document!

Well we’re here to tell you that you don’t have to install sonar panels on your roof and only eat lentils. It’s all about taking baby steps. Here we’re going to look at some of the easiest ways that you can adopt a green lifestyle starting today.

Care for your car

Many green lovers think the only way to go green with their car is to scrap their old one, and pick up a hybrid or electric vehicle. But think about it – scrapping your old car isn’t great for the environment either.

You can alter the way you drive to become more efficient. You should make sure your four wheels are in tip top shape too. The better it runs, the safer for the environment it will be.

Here’s a rundown on how you can drive smarter.

Turn down your thermostat

Controlling the temperature in your house is important. It doesn’t matter whether it’s summer or winter; you need to make life comfy inside!

But controlling the temperature uses energy, something that’s not only costing you, but it’s costing the environment too. We recommend biting the bullet, and spending a little more on your thermostat.

Nest are a Google owned company who build smart thermostats. It learns the temperature you like, can figure out when you’re not home, and uses minimal energy.

Put simply – it’s great for the environment. You can learn more about Nest here.

Change your lightbulbs

This is so easy, and can make such a difference. Regular incandescent bulbs aren’t efficient in terms of energy. Another alternative is Compact fluorescent lights, but those are dangerous. They contain mercury, a material linked with birth defects and brain damage.

The safest, most efficient option is LED lights. They’ll outlive most other types of lightbulb.

Walk everywhere

This is the easiest one on our list, and the most enjoyable. So no excuses here.

Millions of people make the simplest of journeys everyday by car. Journeys that they could quite easily walk. So leave the car keys at home the next time you’re heading out to the shops or to work.

Plus, not only is it great for the environment, but it’s great for your health too. A win, win.

We aim to recycle as much waste as possible at A Plus Waste Management, can you say the same about your household?

There are many weird and wonderful ways to recycle waste goods but did you know human excrement can be recycled too?

We’re not trying to gross you out at A Plus Waste management, one of the wackiest thing you could do with human waste is power a bus, and we’ve got the evidence to back this up.

Ride a Bus Powered by Human Poo!

Use the bus regularly and you’ll be used to diesel powered public transport. Whether you ride the bus to work, take a trip into town, or rely on the service to get to the shops, buses have provided trusted transport solutions for a number of decades and they have primarily been powered by diesel fuel, although hybrid versions are slowly starting to gain a little recognition.

Say there was another alternative though. Suppose you could buy a ticket to ride on a bus that was fuelled by human waste? Would you be interested in such a crazy concept or would the thought of ‘Poo Power’ leave you feeling repulsed?

(Image Source)

Ride on the Bio-Bus in Bristol and you don’t have any choice. This innovative transport solution is powered by gas generated from human and food waste, it’s a methane monster and it can travel up to 186 miles on a tank of gas.

It sounds gross but it’s good for the environment

Does the thought of riding the Bio-Bus make you feel awkward? It shouldn’t do, this 40 seat transport solution looks just like any other single deck bus, it’s just as reliable and all the methane gas is stored safely inside a sealed tank, so the only whiffs you’ll experience will be from fellow passengers!

This is an extreme case of recycling waste but it’s also a practical solution as well. The bus is technically powered by local residents. It runs off methane gas generated from 75 million cubic metres of sewage waste and 35,000 tonnes of food waste treated each year at Bristol Sewage plant.

What a brilliant use of waste!

It just goes to show. No matter what type of waste your household produces there’s a good chance it can be recycled. We might not dispose of human waste at A Plus but we can certainly help with any skip hire requirements you require.