SKIP WATCH

You know the increasing need to consider the environment, right? Well, it got me thinking (doesn’t happen often, but it gets me through the ad breaks when I don’t have a Pot Noodle to tend to) while we indulge in the sheer delight of all these gloriously overloaded skips, are we missing an altogether more important issue – underloaded skips?
I was on a bus into Manchester after a long lunch yesterday afternoon (I left the car at The Red Lion – for the sake of the environment, of course), when I saw a typical 8 yard builder’s skip being collected from the road outside a house refurb. From my vantage point upstairs, desperately clinging to the bars of the swaying seat in front, I was able to peer down at the contents of the skip. I was amazed – but for all the wrong reasons. Barely covering the base of the skip, I saw about a dozen broken paving slabs, a couple of paint cans, the obligatory newspaper and what looked like a discarded kebab (hence the kebab I immediately purchased when I arrived at my destination). And let’s face it, I was p***** again so there may only have been half the amount of stuff I actually thought I saw through that sweaty bus window!
My point is this; even without considering the extra cost of hiring an overly-large skip these days, it’s surely just plain wrong to go hiring a skip that ends up being barely half-filled? To get incisively environmentalist about it, there’s still the same pollution caused by the truck that drops and collects it… the same sliver of tree used for the paperwork… the same drain on the National Grid when the customer makes a brew for the driver, and so on (that’s an unwritten law, by the way, so make sure you’re getting your collection brew or you’ll just be furthering the problem by stopping off for drinks that come in disposable containers – make sure the customer understands that they are helping the environment by furnishing you with your beverage of choice).
A handful of paving slabs can cripple a car, so I’m not suggesting that a skip was unnecessary in this case, but a bit of homework and basic ‘guestimation’ would probably have saved the customer some money, and the environment some abuse.
One way of reducing this kind of wasteful, over-sized skip ordering is to provide customers with a guide to what kind of skip they should order for the job at hand – the TopSkips web site does this job very well, whilst also giving the customer some reassurance that they are dealing with a company who wants to meet their needs, rather than push the most expensive option.
Here’s another idea I had (that’s two in one month – I’ll be on “The Apprentice” soon, I reckon). It’s a bit radical as it involves people actually making contact with their neighbours, but I’ll throw it out there anyway…
It’s basically the opposite of ‘skip-jacking’ (when you hire a nice empty skip, and then find that one of your lovely neighbours plucked up the Stella-fuelled, midnight courage to fill it with their entire life’s possessions). What if there was a scheme to encourage ‘skip-sharing’? A special deal could be offered to neighbours who book a shared skip – gaining new business from people who wouldn’t consider ordering a skip for their amount of waste alone, but might take advantage of an opportunity to share the cost with a neighbour. A simple leaflet drop could inform a whole street of the opportunity to get rid of their waste at an affordable price, as well as outlining the environmental benefits of skip-sharing (not to mention the fact that it might even go some way to reviving a sense of ‘community’). Your business gets to promote its environmental commitment, skip hire becomes affordable to people who would otherwise feel out-priced, and skip-jacking/fly-tipping could even be reduced.
Is it a rubbish idea? (That’s the oldest pun in the industry, so believe me when I say it’s not intended.) Let me know what you think anyway – it could be completely unworkable as you will know better than me.
If you’ve made it this far through my ramblings, you may well be thinking “Get on with it, man, you’ve made your point!” (In fact, you’re probably thinking something far more unprintable, as even I’m thinking that!) So, not wanting to disappoint those of you who share my ultimate passion, below is an overloaded skip from Centro Waste Skip Hire in Birmingham. It reminds me of a party I went to recently, where the ‘buffet’ was basically some breadsticks and cheese straws crammed into an undersized glass (which was appropriate, as the girl who’s party it was looked surprisingly similar in her outfit – it’s okay, she’s too busy lying to her ‘friends’ on Facebook to be reading The Skip).

So, let me know your thoughts on skip-sharing, keep those overloaded gems coming, and snap any outrageously underloaded skips you pick up. I’m going to start keeping a tally of which is more rife (unless someone can suggest a better reason for my life) As usual, email pr@theskip.net or post them to – The Skip, Baxall Business Centre, Adswood Road,Stockport, SK3 8LF.