We recently took our second full load of fly-tipped rubbish from the streets of London boroughs, including near our own headquarters in Bexley, to an official waste disposal facility. This was under our commitment that for every 100 loads booked, we will at our own expense responsibly dispose of one full van load of fly-tipped waste.
In our recent blog post, A View From The Tip, we outlined what happens to waste at a tip. In this blog post, we get more personal about our experience on this sunny October day.
We will post separately about our hours of travel picking up the fly-tipped rubbish. Here, we talk about the end of the journey on a satisfying day of collecting irresponsibly tipped rubbish.
The team for the day was our Founder, Freddie Jacobs, along with team member Brad, and their van, with its range of equipment and tools from hammers to saws and more, ready to tackle even the most obdurate of waste items. Not only did we collect the fly-tipped rubbish until the van was full, but we did it as professionally as we do for any of our other jobs, bagging and sorting appropriately and leaving the spaces which had been fly-tipped brushed and tidy.
Picking up fly-tipped rubbish is one thing. Disposing of it responsibly is another. On this occasion, the journey’s end was the Veolia-run Greenwich Integrated Waste Facility. Depending on the day and the amount of trucks – up to and including massive articulated lorries – there can be an hour or more to wait to enter. On this occasion, the wait was brief, but made easier by Hits Radio London playing a Post Malone song on the cab stereo.
The scent of a refuse centre isn’t as awful as might be imagined, but there was a sweet, mouldy, sharp smell in the air. Visually, there was a flow, hum and shuffle of small forklift trucks tending to the incessant ebb and flow of the tidal wave of rubbish to and from the grey metallic buildings that surrounded us.
The first act for a vehicle entering the facility is to be weighed, and onto the large iron pad we went. From there, the next stop was the mattress bay and our first unloading of fly-tipped rubbish. Freddie and Brad donned black and grey hard hats, robust gloves, and hi-vis jackets, and got out of the cab. The haul for the day had included 11 mattresses, and these were wrestled one by one onto an already significant pile of mattresses of all sizes, patterns, and conditions.
Our next stop was the White Goods station, to drop off a fly-tipped fridge, one of the items that carries an extra fee for disposal that we, obviously, absorb when we do these unpaid fly-tip runs. The small skyscraper of fridges and freezers was next to a television drop point. This held just one sad, solitary, screen-down black flatscreen television seemingly mourning the end of its useful life.
From here, we drove to the cavern of waste, a high-roofed temple of disposal where vans and lorries drop their general waste, with clouds of opportunistic seagulls arcing in and out of the entrance. We entered and reversed into a suitable gap, face on to a mammoth slope of discard: black bags, mostly split with their motley contents spilling out; heaps of broken wood, furniture, and fabrics. Such a mix of end-of-life items and dirt and indescribable, compacted, and spilled-out detritus. This is where the hydraulic back of our van came into its own, tilting to deposit our addition to the nameless piles within. A little lurch forward of the van saw the more immovable objects on board shaken free, and we left the space to go to the exit.
Before we could leave, there came the second weighing. That showed we had dropped off 1040kg of fly-tipped refuse, and, payment made, we were able to exit. As we headed down the roads by the facility, we passed the spot where our vans get their regular clean, but this wasn’t a day for that. It was time to head home, a good job well done.