Trash Talking: How To Improve Your Waste Efficiency
23rd Dec, 2016
When you’ve got tonnes of waste kicking about your home, hiring a skip often seems like a useful option. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But there’s also a good way to stop all that waste from building up in the first place. Here are a few handy tips to help you
Buying In To The Idea
We imagine you probably already know about all the benefits recycling offers us, but a good time to consider that is actually at the buying stage. Even a vague spending structure will not only help you save money in the short term, but help reduce your household waste further down the line. Almost every food as a sell-by date, and while some are more flexible than others, planning your meals effectively can help you to stop your food from unexpectedly going bad, cutting down on your food waste. Buying food in bulk and making strategic use of your freezer can both help with this, helping you cheat some of those tricky sell-by dates.
Hiring a skip often involves throwing in a lot of empty packaging, for items both large and small. Packaging is something that you can cut down on more easily than you’d think, again by being selective with your purchasing. Not only does this cut down on waste, but again puts more money in your pocket. By being savvy with purchases that look like more packaging than product (crisps are a good example of this), you can potentially get yourself better value for your money by switching to another brand.
Extending Usefulness
Changing how we use the things around our house can also save us a lot of time and effort when it comes to skip hire, producing less waste for you to gather up. We’ve just talked about excess packaging, which you can further avoid by reusing containers, whether large or small. Tupperware boxes are a popular choice for preserving school lunches, while plastic bags are excellent examples of things with nearly endless extra uses.
This economical use of household items can help cut down on wastage in more ways than one. For example, household cleaners and chemicals can make up a significant portion of our waste output. Instead of simply drowning stains or marks in household chemicals, sensible periodic applications can remove the stain with just as much effectiveness, but double the efficiency. This helps you cut down on the amount of cleaner you use – without any damage to household hygiene – ultimately meaning that you produce less waste.
Recycling It Forward
Finally, one of the most common reasons for hiring a skip is that of disposing of the larger items, like furniture or electronic waste. But before you send them on to landfill, you might be surprised at how many people might still be interested in them! Second-hand furniture will rarely struggle to find a new home as long as it’s clean, and neighbours or local community centres are both good places to start. If you have no luck there, websites like Gumtree and Freecycle are devoted to encouraging just this kind of recycling.
Meanwhile, broken or even utterly destroyed possessions can still find new homes, sometimes in unexpected places. Electronic equipment can still be salvaged for parts by tech-savvy new owners, and other waste like plastic bottles can be put to new use in art projects or fancy dress costumes. Meanwhile, traditional recycling methods can handle a lot of the remaining potential waste – for example, there are 2.5 billion cans recycled in the UK each year, saving untold amounts of energy and raw materials.
Here at Skip Hire UK, we’re waste disposal experts who are passionate about the environment. To Read more about our green initiatives, as well as other reasons to choose us, you can click here, or you can enter your postcode and hire a skip now!