We undertake house clearance in all areas of Glasgow: Bishopbriggs Giffnock Stepps Bearsden Renfrew Carmunnock Torrance Milngavie Hawkhead Busby Chryston Clydebank Kirkintilloch Paisley Duntocher and Hardgate Gartcosh Barrhead Newton Mearns Inchinnan Uddingston East Kilbride Lennoxtown Milton of Campsie Strathblane Eaglesham.
How Does Northern House Clearance Services Work?
- The first step is to CALL US ON 07966 311 536 for prices/quote.
- We will ask you a few simple questions in order to understand your situation.
- We usually just require 24 hours notice. We like to turn up at 9am on the day of our appointment and stay until the house clearance is complete.
- Once we have removed all of the furniture, junk & rubbish from the house we will issue you with an invoice for your records.
- We ALWAYS keep household items to one side which we know can be either re-used or donated free to charity. Our house clearance charges are fair & we do NOT add 20% VAT on the final price.
A Full List Of Our Glasgow House Clearing Services
House clearances can be potentially stressful & troublesome if you use cowboy companies – Please look at our many House Clearance Recommendations
House Clearance Glasgow Paper Recycling | House Clearance Glasgow Recycling Targets | House Clearance Glasgow & Waste Carriers License | House Clearance Glasgow & Green Policies | House Clearance Glasgow & Fly Tippers
House Clearance Glasgow Paper Recycling
The long-awaited upturn in the Glasgow waste house clearance paper market seems a long way away, and indeed could be delayed still further by the introduction of the waste legislation. As we have reported regularly, these new regulations set new targets to all House Clearance companies in Glasgow for recovery of all types of packaging, which must be born by every part of the house clearance chain. In line with EC targets, the UK Government hopes that half of the 8 million tonnes of packaging waste generated each year will be recovered by the year 2001. It has been fairly obvious from the start that these regulations will have an impact on the house clearance & recycling industry in Glasgow, but it is still not clear just what the effect will be. House clearance pundits are already calling for changes to the packaging regulations.
The British House Clearance Industry is expressing its concern that there is insufficient market demand for used packaging and also a lack of capacity in some paper mills. “We believe that more should have been done to encourage an end user market for recycled materials. Exempting recycled material from the targets would have given packaging specifiers further economic encouragement to use recycled materials.
This would have ensured that the environmental regulations became a self-fulfilling economic proposition.” To simply set a target is not enough: if the infrastructure is either not in place or is in no position to cope, then problems will result. Most of the packaging in the household waste stream is either plastic or paper. Both recycling industries & House clearance companies in Glasgow are experiencing low prices for secondary materials due mainly to falling prices in the raw material markets. Increasing the amount of material collected for recycling will not help a market where merchants cannot sell existing stocks. There is a glut of recovered paper throughout most of Europe: this situation looks set to get worse, rather than better.
House Clearance Glasgow Recycling Targets
The Glasgow house clearance industry finds itself in a no win situation when it comes to meeting environmental targets. Either, it would appear, they must accept a voluntary code of practice or they will be at the mercy of an EU directive. The reason why both options are losers for the house clearance industry in Glasgow is simple. If we take the first option, the house clearance option, then they will not only have to satisfy any EU standards but more importantly, they will be controlled, to a greater or lesser extent, by the large waste transfer stations. Maybe the waste transfer stations are really nice guys who want to encourage the reuse of house clearance materials throughout Glasgow and beyond. Unfortunately, we live in the real world. Yes, they make a lot of noise about recycling and the environment to keep legislators off their backs but, at the end of the day, they are in the business of charging for all waste recycable or not. The alternative is an EU directive which will at least have the benefit of promoting environmental enhancements.
Unfortunately though, we live in a country that seems to apply EU legislation with such vigour that you know this would spell yet another load of red tape for the house clearance companies in Glasgow and the rest of the UK for that matter – that stuff I can remember some government saying they would reduce! The house clearance companies in Glasgow will be required to monitor just how much of each house clearance contents has gone for reuse. This information is an essential part of the equation to accurately indicate the percentage of house clearance recycling. This is going to cost a great deal of money and is really not the house clearance companies’ problem, but the responsibility of the waste transfer station. Be under no illusions, monitoring will be expensive.
On the Continent, 3 countries operate schemes that raise money to aid environmental household disposal. If the UK operated a scheme then £200 million could be raised to pay for increased environmental efficiencies and their monitoring. This sounds rather sensible, but, if we return to our two options above, then it is easy to see what could happen. If we operate under an EU Directive, then the Government would collect the money and it is hard to believe that the money would end up where it was intended. If the waste transfer stations achieve a voluntary agreement then they will be in charge of the purse strings, and the house clearance companies they want will be required to dance to their tune.
House Clearance Glasgow & Waste Carriers License
I don’t think I get ‘wound up’ too often, but a recent article in the Glasgow House Clearance Bulletin, ‘Policing the Environment’, really did the trick. For those who didn’t see the article, it was an interview with John Anderson, a senior advisor to the Environment Agency’s waste management and regulation policy group and Bob Bunting, regional manager for the Glasgow House Clearance industry. I have, in my time met both of these gentleman and know them to be reasonable human beings. So why do these people have such trouble grasping the obvious. The article states that 30% of waste transfer stations have never applied for a site licence or an exemption. Mr. Anderson is reported as saying, “There is no duty on the authority to look for unlicensed waste transfer facilities”. What really is so hard to grasp is that we have to operate in a system which is designed to penalise the genuine merchant. Those who have decided to stick two fingers up at the Environment Agency are to be left to get on with polluting whatever and however they want, whilst the merchant who tries to play by the rules gets penalised, time and time again.
Another shocking aspect of the article was a statement relating to waste carriers’ ( All of our House clearance glasgow teams carry these licenses) licences, “It is only £95 for three years and £65 a year after that. It is not expensive”. No, in isolation it is not expensive but one must remember, it isn’t in isolation. It is part of a package where everything has a cost – renewing your exemption, applying for a licence, carrying out site improvements, notification for special wastes. Yes, some of the costs are minor in isolation but, when one adds them all together it has to come out of the house clearance companies profit to pay the wages of the Environment Agency. This again, in itself is not a bad thing, but whilst the legitimate house clearer is footing an ever increasing bill, the illegal merchant, who the Environment Agency is not interested in, is becoming ever more profitable.
A simple way to illustrate my point is to look at two house clearance services operating in Glasgow. One operates within the law. And, for doing his best, within his limited budget he is hassled by EA officers. The other house clearance service on the other hand prefers to ignore what is going on around him. Couple this to the savings he has made because he isn’t paying for this form and that form, he isn’t buying correct ppe, he isn’t ensuring his house clearance vans are eco friendly, he isn’t putting his house clearance staff on the books, I could go on. It isn’t hard to see which is the most profitable house clearance business and which is more likely to survive. It is no use the Environment Agency bleating that they are just carrying out the Government’s orders. That’s just an excuse as the laws have been fashioned by their influence. It is about time they stopped picking on the good guys because they are easy targets and sorted out the real cowboy house clearance offenders in the Glasgow area.
House Clearance Glasgow & Green Policies
The environment was not one of the main election issues, but the Labour party did issue their official ‘green’ policies in their party manifesto. They say they will set up an environment taskforce using money from a windfall tax on the privatised utilities. They describe this as part of their pledge to get 250,000 under-25 year-olds off benefit and into work. Just what these youngsters will be doing is worrying some sectors of the industry. If for example they are set to work on recycling schemes or house clearance schemes will this create unfair competition and put long established trusted house clearance companies in the Glasgow area out of business?
Labour-intensive sorting could be one of the main areas affected by the huge increase in a subsidised workforce. You wonder whether the Government will set up separate companies to run this environmental taskforce or will they place workers with established recycling & house clearance businesses. If they do, this could mean some house clearance companies have an unfair advantage over their competitors. Another of Labour’s pledges is that they intend to “play a leading role in international environmental treaties”. This presumably includes the Basel Convention, which has been a worrying issue for those involved in the international trade in recyclables. On the plus side, maybe a Labour government may prove more receptive to the pleas of support from our industry, or taking a more pessimistic viewpoint, they could be so committed to European dogma that the interests of British industry takes a back seat.
We must all hope that Labour brings a new administration: many of the issues that have caused sleepless nights to recyclers & house clearance companies in Glasgow alike have been brought about by the civil service rather than politicians, who often did not even appear to know what was going on. At the beginning of Labour’s term, it is likely that the faceless bureaucrats will still call the shots. The industry associations must take this change of government as a new opportunity for the recycling & house clearance industry to see its interests met rather than ignored.
House Clearance Glasgow & Fly Tippers
In one of the most bizarre house clearance fly-tipping incidents of recent times, over 2 ton of house clearance furniture dumped in the middle of a road near Glasgow. On 16th May, local Environment Agency waste regulation officers reported that the house clearance furniture had been dumped in a very dangerous position on a road just off the the main motorway into Glasgow. The pile was 25 metres long, and Ian Jobes, local EA waste manager commented, “Fly tipping of house clearance furniture is something which occurs far too often and these have been dumped with a total disregard for safety on an unlit road. They must have been tipped overnight and a motorist coming round the corner at speed could have crashed into it all.”
Unlicensed house clearance companies disposing of furniture is obviously a problem: as we reported last year, it would be interesting to compare the level of house clearance fly-tipping now with that before the introduction of the Landfill Tax. Although this new tax was designed to encourage waste minimisation (and in the process raise much needed money for the Treasury), is it working effectively? Perhaps it might be worth taking a look at the US model. Industry commentators in the US are predicting that all waste will soon be recovered, which will then allow processors to work on reducing landfill. It might be worthwhile adopting something similar in this country, or we will no doubt continue to read more reports about house clearance fly-tipping in the Glasgow area of massive amounts of waste. The legal penalties are obviously not proving much of a deterrent.