chainsaws

[Penners]

:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[JohnB]

The Environmental Agency took the view that seperate disposal was not necessary ...

I don't know why, but I find it difficult to trust institutions that can't use spell-checkers.

I'm sure the institution that trained Harry Potter would have taught him to check them. I'm more concerned about getting my spelling right :wink:.

 

[Feltwell]

LOL - it is a problem with disposing of things that you're not supposed to put in landfill.
I'm resigned that I will end up having to hire a skip to remove a bunch of stuff which is clogging up the coachhouse and is unlikely to be used along with about 1/2 a ton of rubble and a bunch of broken bricks.

I'm also lucky enough to gave an asbestos reinforced bath panel and water tank. I can take them to the recycling centre for free disposal as they were DIY removed - however I'm advised not to transport them inside my car. I don't have a roof rack and it might be risky to tie them on to one anyway as it risks crumbling the material.
I could borrow a pickup truck & trailer from a friend but as it'd be a commercial vehicle relating to a building trade I would expect some grief about the "domestic" nature of the waste. So for now they sit wrapped in polythene in the drive.

Is this not a good excuse to get yourself a trailer AMc? Mine must have paid for itself many times over by now.

It would have cost me £1500 to get rid of my asbestos garage - instead I spent £600 on a good secondhand 8'x4' bed twin axle trailer and took the asbestos to the tip for free. It's done umpteen trips to the tip with building and garden waste saving me skip hire at ~ £100 a time, lots of trips round the country buying stuff for the house, collected building materials, transported my motorbikes, lots of furniture moving, camping holidays, scrounged by various family members, etc etc - and having it stops you trashing the inside of your car by using it to carry rubbish to the tip!

If you've got somewhere to store one I'd say it's well worth it. Mine has certainly saved me hiring a van on many occasions - it's got a frame that fixes to the top of it with a cover that goes over, turning it into a waterproof box trailer.

I've certainly been glad of it today. Possibly one of the most horrible jobs ever - yesterday we noticed that one of the manhole covers in our driveway had water coming out of it - the foul drain was blocked, and had been for some time by the state of it. Several hours with drain rods later and I had working drains & 8 rubble sacks full of, well shall we just say the contents of the blocked drains. I had to get rid of the sacks somehow, and there was no way they were being taken to the tip inside the car, even if well sealed up with cable ties! Not a job I wish to repeat in a hurry.

 

[Fred Drift]

To drift away from my normal MO and post on topic (which in itself is obviously a diversion from my regular behaviour and thus entirely consistent with being inconsistent):

Wow, what a sh!tty job.

Fred.

 

[Penners]

Fred, you need a haircut.

 

[d49xc]

my local council is doing it best to ban trailers from its waste tips: they can be a menace to be honest as you have to reverse out of each 'lot'.
(I've towed glider trailers which can be 12m long total so have 'sort of' mastered the art of reversing trailers - on a good day)
Not got a trailer so don't know the exact rules..but as far as I can gather
You can bring one in 12 times during the year if you apply for a trailer pass prior.
After that you must wait till the next year and re-apply for another pass for another 12 goes.
Pass is currently free - but I'd imagine it won't be for long
There is a limit on trailer size and "commercial" type or sized trailers even if towed behind a std car are not permitted.
Dont ask abut the rules for van's when hired by private individuals as opposed to vans used by commercial tradesman...I really don't know how they differentiate between them.

 

[Feltwell]

A fair point, you do need to check before getting a trailer as each authority has different rules. We have to have a permit slip for each time we go to the tip with the trailer - sometimes they bother to take it off me, sometimes not. They comes in books of 20 and you can have only 1 book at a time until you get down to 3 slips left, but there seems to be no restriction on how many books you can have in a year and there is no charge. I guess if you kept continually applying then they would refuse eventually. Keeping trade waste out of the sites is their concern.

Where my parents live the rules are different again, there is a restriction on trailer size unless you are bringing in garden waste, in which case you can have whatever size you want. My trailer is fairly large by domestic standards and just falls inside the limit.

Manoeuvring with a trailer is OK where we are, apart from at 1 site where you have to uncouple the trailer, else you block the traffic flow completely when parked.

 

[philpjuk100]

When we moved out of our previous property on taking our rubbish to the local tip on a trailer we checked the council web site which told us we could use a trailer "less than 4ft6" front board to back board" on arrival at the tip the chap at the entrance had his bit of 2x2 with a felt tip mark at 4ft6inches he put this up to the tail board and as it did not touch the back of my car refused to let me in! I pointed out the distance between front and back boards was 4ft but we were still refused entrance.We had to unhitch the trailer down the road and "ferry" the rubbish in the car boot.Is it any wonder that you see piles of rubbish in hedgerows?

 

[Penners]

Our recycling centre won't permit more than two dustbin bags full (or equivalent volume) of hardcore per week from any one individual. When I asked the Supervisory Operative why, he just shrugged and replied, "I don't make the rules, mate."

There may be a perfectly reasonable and justifiable explanation for this regulation. But it seems to me that if you want to get people on your side you should be prepared to make public the reasons for such restrictions. Otherwise they just look like petty officiousness.

 

[skier-hughes]

They have to pay landfill tax, done by weight, and can offset this with recycling - green waste, which is why they limit one and not the other.
You have to book in your trailer round here by phone first.

 

[Penners]

As I said, Graham, I'm not taking issue with the actual reasons but with the unwillingness to explain them. The attitude that I've encountered just seems to be "because we say so".

 

[skier-hughes]

I doubt they know why

 

[Flyfisher]

How do you dispose of plasterboard offcuts? The council tip - sorry, recycling centre - won't take anything with gypsum content. So what does one do with them? They're too small to be of any practical use, and they currently sit in my garage getting damp .

Anyone got an answer to this problem?

I would not recommend breaking plasterboard offcuts into smallish pieces and gradually feeding them into your domestic rubbish over a period of a few collections because no-one will ever notice and the waste will be efficiently sent to landfill without having to drive tens or hundreds of miles to a special disposal facility so that a container-load of the stuff can be collected and then sent to landfill in one big lump.

This would be like throwing old batteries and mercury-filled CFL bulbs into the domestic rubbish bin . . . which, of course, no one ever does anymore.

 

[Penners]

I would not recommend breaking plasterboard offcuts into smallish pieces and gradually feeding them into your domestic rubbish over a period of a few collections because no-one will ever notice and the waste will be efficiently sent to landfill without having to drive tens or hundreds of miles to a special disposal facility so that a container-load of the stuff can be collected and then sent to landfill in one big lump.

Phew! Thanks so much for that warning, FF. Without it I might have come around to that idea.

 

[AMc]

FWIW _ Norfolk used to accept domestic asbestos at their Costessey transfer station and reimburse home owners for the cost of DIY asbestos contaminated items (Like my bath panel and water tank). From the end of March they will no longer do this so you have to find a local contractor or pay at the tip. Their brief guide suggests many people will charge £250 as a minimum. Seems that leaving this job has cost me money - I only hope I can get one of the licensed firms to pick up my bits on the way past and pay the least possible amount.
I dread to think how much more contaminated waste will now be flytipped - my builders thought I was mad for not just chucking this stuff in the skip when it was here

@Feltwell - The trailer would have been a very good idea if I'd got it at the very beginning of my project. Now it isn't really worth having a tow bar fitted and buying a reasonable trailer for the remaining bits. I'm not sure what I could reasonably tow from the back of my A Class Merc, but I don't think my partners MINI Cooper S cabriolet would be any better equipped

 

[Penners]

From the end of March they will no longer do this so you have to find a local contractor or pay at the tip. Their brief guide suggests many people will charge £250 as a minimum.

What utter madness. As you say, AMc, we can now expect the countryside to be littered not just with unsightly flytipped rubbish, but dangerous stuff, too.

I despair...

 

[Flyfisher]

. . . and rightly so.

Apparently, councils will not remove anything fly-tipped onto private land, though they will issue the landowner with an enforcement notice to clear the stuff up. If it's asbestos and the land is being used as a business, typically farming, then it'll be regarded as trade waste and high-cost licenced contractors will be needed to remove it. Gone are the days of farmers being able to just (legally) bury the stuff.

I've also read that if you employ contractors to dispose of any sort of waste, e.g. garden rubbish or basic building waste, then YOU are also liable if that waste ends up being fly-tipped somewhere, which seems somewhat contrary to natural justice to me.

When I was digging trenches for some new surface water drainage pipes, I came across a couple of small rubbish pits containing ashes from, presumably, a domestic bonfire plus various bits of broken glass and crockery etc. I presume this was fairly normal in the days before organised rubbish collection, especially in a rural area such as ours and where the house a bit of spare land around it.

If the waste nazis continue playing silly beggars, I may resort to such things myself - it doesn't take much effort to dig a small pit with the front loader of a tractor. Surely that would be perfectly in keeping with a period property? (well, not the tractor!).

 

[Feltwell]

Our recycling centre won't permit more than two dustbin bags full (or equivalent volume) of hardcore per week from any one individual. When I asked the Supervisory Operative why, he just shrugged and replied, "I don't make the rules, mate."

There may be a perfectly reasonable and justifiable explanation for this regulation. But it seems to me that if you want to get people on your side you should be prepared to make public the reasons for such restrictions. Otherwise they just look like petty officiousness.

It IS petty rules like this that give local authorities a reputation for unnecessary officaldom. Fair enough, they want to stop builders from dumping waste through their recycling centres - why should the general resident carry the burden of business waste disposal costs?

But - all too frequently it seems that local authority officers forget that they are there to serve the local population in cases like this, and should take their needs into account when regulating. 2 bags maximum of hardcore will stop the builders. But the average resident doing a bit of DIY never wants to dispose of 2 bags a week - they probably want to dispose of 1 larger batch in a year, when they do that one-off job on their house that generates the waste. They certainly don't then want to spend the next 10 weeks taking 2 bags a week to the local tip. So use some imagination and regulate in a way that restricts how much can be disposed of in a year but doesn't limit to a stupidly low amount per week!

I wanted to widen the entrance to my driveway. The faceless drone in the local highways department was like a stuck record and clearly considered speaking to a resident as something she should not have to do - her attitude and tone of voice were appalling when she finally deigned to speak to me. So I jumped through all their hoops, gave them the 8 weeks notice of works they demanded so they could arrange an inspection, paid for the OS map copy they demanded (apparently "the driveway to No.1 High Street" accompanied by a sketch map wasn't clear enough for them) paid the fees and they didn't even bother to turn up to inspect. The tarmac contractor told me that if I lived half a mile down the road, in the next authority's area, they charge half the fee, want 2 days notice and if you speak to them nicely will even do same day.

That lack of consistency between what each authority will provide, such as the rules on what you can take to the tip, is infuriating. Why is there no national service standard?

Everyone likes to moan about Councils, I know that. I did do a brief stint working in a local authority on process improvement - it nearly drove me insane. I met some fantastic, dedicated people who do a damn hard job for a relatively low wage - especially in that most derided of areas, Social Services. But I also met an awful lot of staff whose entrenched attitude and resistance to change meant that they could never have survived in any employment outside of the public sector. That, combined with the bureaucracy required around any change and the sheer number of parties that have to be consulted, left me with a lasting impression of why local authorities are so often thought to be inefficient and to give poor service - even if for many of their functions that is not actually true.

[/Rant off!]

 

[MdB]

paid for the OS map copy they demanded

Just so you know, and for other people who may come across the same thing when making planning applications, most councils have a mapping service online that you use to produce location maps for free. You need to know what you are doing to get the scaling right when printed out but it isn't too difficult. The Cornish one is here for example: http://mapping.cornwall.gov.uk/website/ccmap/ and you can zoom in to approx 1:1000 level.

 

[Feltwell]

Clearly a generous bunch down in Cornwall - They charge for that round here, or certainly did a while ago. Good tip though, well worth anyone checking where they are.

Another example of an inconsistent approach by different authorities!