Published
We clear waste for a living, so treat this as an interested opinion. That said, there are jobs where a skip is the right answer and we will tell you so rather than take a booking that does not suit you.
The practical difference
With a skip, you hire the container, it sits on your drive or on the road, and you do all the loading yourself. With a man and van, we bring the van to the door, we load it, and it goes the same visit.
That labour difference is the whole thing. If you have a garage of old furniture and nobody available to carry it out, a skip means you are still standing in the garage in three days' time.
Where a skip costs more than it looks
If the skip goes on the road rather than your own drive, you need a council permit, and that is an extra cost and a wait.
It sits there for the hire period. On a narrow terraced street that is a week of a container outside your house and one fewer parking space for everyone.
Skips get filled by other people overnight. It happens, and you pay to dispose of whatever ends up in it.
You cannot overfill it. Anything above the line and it will not be collected.
How we price it instead
Clearance is priced by volume, from around £150, with no VAT. Single bulky items are charged individually: a bed is £80, a sofa £95, an armchair £84, a fridge £120. You pay for the space your waste actually takes up in the van rather than for a container size you guessed at.
We are an Environment Agency registered upper-tier waste carrier, licence CBDU445737, so everything goes through licensed routes and you get a waste transfer note for your records.
When a skip is genuinely better
A building or renovation project generating waste over several weeks. You want a container on site, not repeat van visits.
Large volumes of rubble, soil or hardcore. That is heavy, low-value waste and a skip handles it better.
You have plenty of time, plenty of help and your own driveway to put it on.
If your job is one house's worth of furniture, garden waste, an old suite or a garage full of accumulated stuff, and you would rather it was simply gone by this afternoon, that is the van.
