Chips for all!

Bulky garden waste is the bane of our lives at the Recycling Site. As summer arrives, so do the trailers of greenery for disposal. In the old days, we had a skip purely for Garden Waste. Unfortunately, the volumes arriving from Harris households was never enough to justify this. There was one instance where the skip had sat filling on the yard for 6 weeks in the summer heat. When the skip lorry came to collect, as he lifted it up, brown lumpy soup ran out the back. The grass clippings had turned to sludge. So despite the local authority desperately needing green waste for its biodigester at The Creed, we stopped segregating green waste and sent it all, with the residual waste, to landfill.

Over the last year, for various reasons, the skip turnover rate has slowed. In 2024 we routinely had to close the site because the skips were full and we couldn’t take any more. Going back to the bulky garden waste – this was now causing a problem by consuming so much precious space in the skips. Late in the year we decided to free up skip space by stockpiling the green waste. A couple of months ago, we finally called in the chipper-boys to munch through the pile. It took two men, two days with an industrial chipper to get through the pile and cost over £700. The end result ….

Six weeks on, we have repurposed 5 “ton bags” of chips. There has been a lot of interest within the community for use as a mulch or weed suppressant. We’ve recovered half the cost in donations, so will probably do it again.

Next time though we need to be a bit more selective about what we keep to chip. It needs to be more "woody" than "green". Leaves just make a mess!