Skip Bins for Construction Waste
Skip Bins are the reality for many residential customers doing renovation work at home. When the builders are called in, the skips appear – and no one questions what is going to happen to the waste that is created. Here are the sobering statistics. Kiwis now produce approximately 3,150,000 tonnes of waste that gets tipped into landfill per year…
Tonnes are hard to visualise, but this roughly equates to 126,000 shipping containers per year…or 315,000 buses a year. All of this is tipped into big holes in the ground, eventually covered up with soil and left to “do its thing”. Only 20% is household kerb collected waste, the rest is residential construction and commercial construction waste…
Skip Bin Rubbish off to Landfill
Everything that gets thrown into a skip like this- gets tipped into landfill. Dumped into yet more holes carved out of our beautiful earth. To leach the horrendous chemicals that coat a lot of building products into our soils and eventually into the waterways. Nothing gets sorted or plucked out for saving, that takes too much manpower, the skip simply gets hoisted onto a truck, taken to the tip and perfectly good timber, gib board, fixtures and fittings all get thrown away. And no, they won’t take the random e waste item hopefully placed beside the skip!
Skip Bin Hire Costs
The builders or the apprentices on site have to cart all of this out of the house/building site, up the drive, lift it up high and toss it into the skip. Apart from the environmental concerns, slips, trips and falls are the leading cause of work-related injuries. Whilst your builders are carrying waste off site and throwing it into a skip, they are not building, and you are paying for that waste management as part of the builder’s labour charges on top of the skip costs. In Auckland, the two largest skip bin providers are owned by Chinese companies, and those same companies also own the landfills- so commercially they want as much waste as possible, which isn’t helping change any behaviours anytime soon.
Junk Run is Auckland’s most sustainable waste management company and we genuinely want to lead the change about how Kiwi’s and their builders think about and deal with waste. We are passionate about helping our communities and the environment. Our two-person teams and trucks will come along and carefully hand sort the waste materials alongside the builders, and ensure as much as possible is reallocated, repurposed or recycled. We provide real time reporting and can offer Green Star credits for your building work if this is required. The cost of using our hands on sustainable rubbish removal service is very comparable to skip bins ( and flexibins )when you start to properly include all the extra unseen charges that are never factored in.
Timber can be re-used or recycled- as can gib plasterboard, old windows, kitchens, bathrooms and insulation as long as they are not smashed to smithereens. For larger items you can try a new Auckland based app called civil share to list any building items or materials you want to get rid of.
Until we change our mentality of getting rid of waste for the cheapest price possible, we are literally adding to the tsunami of crap we are piling into our own backyard for our future Tamariki to inherit along with all the environmental woes that go with this.