What Happens to Your Waste After We Collect It?

When our van drives away from your property, that's the end of the process for you. But for your waste, the journey is just beginning. Here's where everything goes.

Step 1: Transfer Station

Our first stop is always a licensed waste transfer station. This is a large indoor facility where waste is unloaded, inspected, and sorted into different material streams. Nothing goes directly to landfill from our vans.

Step 2: Sorting

At the transfer station, waste is sorted into categories: metals (ferrous and non-ferrous), wood, cardboard and paper, plastics, textiles, green waste, WEEE (electricals), and residual waste. Each stream has a different destination.

Step 3: Recycling

**Metals** go to specialist metal recyclers where they're melted and reformed. **Wood** goes to wood recycling — clean timber becomes animal bedding or biomass fuel, treated wood is processed separately. **Cardboard and paper** are baled and sent to paper mills. **Green waste** goes to composting facilities. **WEEE** goes to specialist processors who extract valuable materials and safely handle hazardous components.

Step 4: Charity Donation

Items in good condition — furniture, clothing, household goods — are set aside during sorting and collected by our charity partners. These items get second lives with people who need them.

Step 5: Energy Recovery

Some waste that can't be recycled goes to energy-from-waste facilities where it's burned to generate electricity. This is significantly better than landfill as it produces useful energy and doesn't generate methane.

Step 6: Landfill (Last Resort)

Only waste that can't be recycled, recovered, or converted to energy goes to landfill. For us, this is consistently less than 20% of what we collect — and we're always working to reduce it further.