What Happens To Garden Waste After You Hire A Skip?
4th Dec, 2017
Now that autumn is quickly giving way to full blown winter, you may well have been taking the opportunity to give your garden a bit of a trim and a tidy, perhaps using some of the methods we outlined in one of our previous blogs. But after you collect it all and hire a skip to come and dispose of it, you might be asking; what happens to your garden waste? Well, never fear, because at Skip Hire Network, we’ve got the answer!
The Process For Recycling Garden Waste
Essentially, having lived a full, loving life on your lawn or hanging from your trees, most of your garden waste goes on to be turned into nutrient-rich soil conditioner. This can then be used in farming applications and land reclamation. If you’ve ever bought multipurpose compost in a garden centre, you’ve likely already used someone else’s garden waste! So, how does it get to that?
Well, first the waste is taken to a composting site. Immediately on arrival, anything that’s not compostable (plastics, rocks, those sneakers you spent ages looking for) is removed. From there, what’s left is shredded and laid out in a long pile, usually outside, to decompose. You might recognise this so far as a similar process as to what happens in your tiny composting bin at home. But we bet your humble composting bin couldn’t reach temperatures of up to 60oC, which is what this larger-scale process involves!
These high temperatures do two things – first, enzymes and bacteria present in the soil work overtime to decompose the soil. Meanwhile, harmful microbes, weeds and plant diseases are killed off as the material is turned over periodically. The compost is then screened a final time to remove any remaining contaminants, and the experts then make a decision on where it’s going to go (farms or garden centres, for example.) Anything that’s not decomposed well enough gets the joy of restarting the process, which takes between 8 and 16 weeks.
What You Need To Do With Garden Waste
You’ll be happy to hear that you don’t need to do much to ensure that the process all goes smoothly. Mainly, it comes down to a matter of making sure that your garden waste is as clean and clear as possible. That means no contaminants like plastic, liquids or household waste! If you’re wondering what can be composted, it mostly includes tree bark, flowers, grass and hedge cuttings, leaves, plants, twigs and branches, and weeds.
At Skip Hire Network, we make it a priority of ours to make sure that everything we collect is recycled and put to use elsewhere as much as possible. That includes garden waste, so when you hire a skip with us, you can be sure that you’re doing a little bit of good at the same time.
It’s easy, too – all you have to do is enter your postcode and phone number onto our homepage before you’ll find yourself looking at an instant skip hire quote. From that point, there are only a few more details to finalise before your skip will be winging its way towards you. What’s not to like?
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