Share your recycling successes

[Cpd]

Gabion baskets made from old fencing wire and reclaimed stone salvaged from site. 

[Cpd]

Timber staircase made from scrap timber reclaimed from the back of timber merchants stacks and the lids of whiskey barrels as treads, even the screws were reclaimed from an aviary I dismantled….

 

[Cpd]

I turned this fallen oak (that fell on my access road) into roof ties and and slabbed the rest for future projects…..  

[saveasteading]

4 hours ago, Andy brown said:

not to have a  skip on site if you can avoid it

How true. They fill with stuff so quickly. Some of that is decent material that you have paid for, and some you will not recognise as it comes from another site.

And then there is a LOT of air if they are filling it unsupervised.

The waste centres that sort it make half of their money from collecting the disposal charge but not then sending so much out again.

I was on a course some years ago, where we established that a skip costs you £1500 (prob £2000 now) because of the decent stuff that goes away in it.

Another contractor on the course changed to hippo bags, sorted by material, and found that roofers who used to let the cut end fall to ground (thn to skip) suddenly preferred to keep and use the ends of battens rather than collect and cut them small enough to go in the small bag.

One of site managers called me the 'skip inspector'.

[Cpd]

I reclaimed old slate from my house and other free bay offerings and then inspected, graded and recut thousands of them  to re roof one of my houses ! 
…….. never again! 

[Onoff]

8 hours ago, Cpd said:

I reclaimed old slate from my house and other free bay offerings and then inspected, graded and recut thousands of them  to re roof one of my houses ! 
…….. never again! 

 

Should rename you Roy Castle!

[Radian]

Another one from me. After the digger and dumper finished assaulting my concrete paving slabs I had to replace the path and patio entirely. This left me with a plentiful supply of hardcore plus nearly one hundred usable riven slabs to hide somewhere. The handiest option was to use them to back the stone retaining wall I was building:

 

 

[Roys]

That looks braw

[SteamyTea]

9 hours ago, Roys said:

braw

Had to look that word up.

[Radian]

2 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Had to look that word up.

 

Me too. Thanks Roys!

I'm told it came out quite well for a novice builder like me. Let's hope the overall design of the construction doesn't let it down - I think I thought of everything ?

Edited December 31, 2021 by Radian

[saveasteading]

13 hours ago, Roys said:

braw

As heard often  in 'The Killing', along with 'komm hier noo bairn' (excuse spelling) which made me realise that Scots is largely Scandinavian.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, saveasteading said:

which made me realise that Scots is largely Scandinavian.

What tall, blond/e, blue eyed, strong and very drunk.

Edited December 31, 2021 by SteamyTea

[Onoff]

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

What tall, blond/e, blue eyed, strong and very drunk.

 

More ginger, bloodshot eyed, strong smelling and very, very drunk surely?

[ToughButterCup]

1 hour ago, saveasteading said:

As heard often  in 'The Killing', along with 'komm hier noo bairn' (excuse spelling) which made me realise that Scots is largely Scandinavian.

 

Nearly. I'm almost sure that its part of the Germanic family of languages. 

 

[Onoff]

2 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

 

Nearly. I'm almost sure that its part of the Germanic family of languages. 

 

 

I seen to remember our Ulster born and bred German teacher saying when he lived in Germany he was complimented on his German for basically lack of a foreign accent.

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Onoff said:

 

More ginger, bloodshot eyed, strong smelling and very, very drunk surely?

That is us down here.

[Onoff]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

That is us down here.

 

All a bunch of C**ts! 

 

Celts that is...

[Pocster]

I salvaged some walk on glazing , yet to find a use for it …

[Radian]

Bumping this up with some more upcycling I did today. Still had a few lengths of batten left over after using most of it for this bit of cladding to one of our boundaries:

 

(not our scruffy roofline, but a neighbours!)

 

This time I'm using it to rebuild the top of a picnic table that's been slowly falling apart:

 

 

Not the ideal timber but I will give it all a good coating of paint. Should give it a couple more years of useful life.

[Onoff]

7 hours ago, Radian said:

Bumping this up with some more upcycling I did today. Still had a few lengths of batten left over after using most of it for this bit of cladding to one of our boundaries:

 

(not our scruffy roofline, but a neighbours!)

 

This time I'm using it to rebuild the top of a picnic table that's been slowly falling apart:

 

 

Not the ideal timber but I will give it all a good coating of paint. Should give it a couple more years of useful life.

 

Well done on staggering home from the pub with that table! 

[Ferdinand]

What a great thread 😁

[Kelvin]

Agreed. Brilliant thread and some great ideas. It’s inspired me not to use a single skip! 

[SteamyTea]

I got some plywood shelves the other day, going to make them into plywood shelves.

Edited August 10, 2022 by SteamyTea

[saveasteading]

14 hours ago, Kelvin said:

not to use a single skip

Highly recommended. we don't have one on what is effectively a £400k job.

 

My pet subject. 

 

In my business we allocated a fixed, and low,  number of skips, but also had a plan for what could go in them and what to do with the rest.

On occasions I had skips emptied and refilled properly: Air is very expensive to cart to tip and pay landfill on, and the skip companies make  a lot by sorting and consolidating.

Site manager had to fill in a form of approximate contents.....so it became easier to think rather than dump.

 

A couple of examples of savings.

A few contractors really bought into this, and I once found our electrician's boss flattening lighting boxes and tying them up neatly, reducing volume by 90%...he then took them to a recycling centre.

 

Another company MD (we were in a waste reduction group) banned skips on a house project and used hippo bags, allocated to different products. His surprise saving was in battens. Prior to this the roofers got to the eaves and sawed off the timber , and it fell to ground then was skipped. With Hippo bags they didn't fit so might as well take them up and reuse as cut to put in the bag.

Similarly, a bag full of half bricks is fairly obvious and unjustifiable. Damaged bricks can obv be hardcore. In a skip they disappear.

 

 

In our study we found that the cost of a skip is not £300 or whatever, but about £2,000 when you included materials that were being dumped without thought , or shouldn't have been bought in the first place. Timber packaging from steel deliveries we gave to schools for woodwork if we hadn't used it for shuttering.

 

The big contractors claimed and boasted of  'zero waste'. But it wasn't true....they defined zero as 'what couldn't reasonably be recycled'.

[Kelvin]

Thanks. Enlightening. I’ll share with my other half. She’s  the sustainability lead in her company. When I first met her she was removing stuff from a skip 😂 

Edited August 10, 2022 by Kelvin