How skips can help landlords to clear flats and houses

Under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 landlords have a responsibility to dispose of any leftover waste in their properties. If they fail to do so properly they could risk serious fines and even prosecution.

In practice this means that when a tenant ends their lease or is evicted it is then up to the landlord to find a way to dispose of any items that are left behind. This applies to waste in both the interior and exterior of the house and it is usually covers the following:

· Waste that is generated from any improvements, repairs or alterations to a property

· Waste that is left behind after a tenant vacates a property

· Fixtures or fittings that have been supplied as part of the lease

· Waste that is removed on behalf of a tenant, rather than by the tenant.

While costs for clearance can sometimes be recovered from your prior tenants if pursued properly, the waste itself will still need to be dealt with either way and the best way to do this is to hire a skip.

It’s important to remember that fly tipping is a punishable offence and can lead to fines of up to £50,000, while leaving waste in the garden, front or back yard could mean smaller fines of up to £2,500. So hiring a skip to fill up with your tenants leftover waste is usually a sensible move.

Here at LSPS, we operate our own waste transfer station which means that you don’t have to separate any of your rubbish before you throw it in the skip – saving you time and money. Click here to book a skip online or call us on freephone 0800 083 7807 to discuss your needs in more detail.

Leicester business cracks eggshell waste problem

A Leicester-based company Just Egg have claimed a massive breakthrough in finding ways to recycle industrial amounts of egg shells.

Just-Egg is a Leicester based egg processing plant run by Pankaj Pancholi. They process hard-boiled eggs which are then used in various different ways such as in salads, mayonnaise and sandwiches and they sell up to 1.5 million eggs a week – which results in lots of egg shell wastage.

While eggshells can be easily composted at home, in an industrial environment they have to be shipped to landfill as the egg waste attached to them can make them rot quickly and smell awful.

However, the process of sending leftover egg shells to landfill is expensive and impractical. So, in an effort to cut-costs and reduce wastage the company has teamed up with Leicester University to look at sustainable alternatives.

Working with the chemistry department at the University of Leicester, their team managed to find a way to separate waste egg shell from the egg white and clean it effectively which means it can now be used as plastic filler and a means of generating further income for the business.

We take recycling seriously at LSPS. For more information or to find out how we can help with your waste disposal efforts, please visit our website or call us on freephone 0800 083 7807.

Tackling waste at modern-day festivals

Whenever a large number of people gather there is always likely to be mess left behind. Take the annual Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm for example, where over 500,000 bags of rubbish were collected by an army of 1,800 litter pickers in 2016. This reportedly cost the organisers £780,000. Whilst it is easy for a wildly popular festival like Glastonbury, where tickets sell out almost immediately, to afford to employ so many refuse collectors, it can be much harder for smaller events to manage a large scale clean-up. Here are a few strategies to tackle waste, that won’t break the bank.

Recycling exchanges
Everyone likes freebies and one way you can encourage festival goers to clean up after themselves is to give away products in exchange for a bag of rubbish. For example, Leeds & Reading Festival have been known to offer a free soft drink to each person handing in a full bag of recyclables. Another strategy is to have a small deposit in place on plastic bottles or cups which can be refunded.

Tent recycling
Festival landscapes are transformed into miniature cities overnight, with many festival goers choosing to stay in tents on the festival site, close to the music. However, with low price tents becoming more easily obtainable some people will treat their tent as disposable and leave it behind. One way to tackle this problem is to set up tent donation points near to campsites, where tents and other leftover camping supplies can be donated and perhaps given to charitable organisations to provide shelter for people in need.

Car Sharing
Another way to reduce the carbon footprint of a festival is to encourage visitors and staff to share their journey, which not only can help cut down emissions but can also save attendees money, should they decide to split their costs.

Green spaces
At some festivals, organisers set up dedicated green spaces where any littering is explicitly banned. The reason for this is that the green space then stands out amongst the rest of the festival site and sets an example of cleanliness for others to follow.

We take recycling seriously at LSPS. For more information or to find out how we can help with your waste disposal efforts, please visit our website or call us on freephone 0800 083 7807.

Edible beer packaging could help save ocean wildlife

An American-based brewery has discovered an innovative way of combating the damage caused by beer packaging to the sea life environment.

Florida based Saltwater Brewery has created six-pack rings for their beer cans which are made up entirely of organic materials and can be composted or ingested by wildlife, such as sea turtles, without any adverse effects.

This is great news for the marine life of our oceans, where it is estimated a hundred thousand animals are entrapped or ingest plastic and die as a result every year, with sea birds, fish, sharks and important plankton all affected.

Currently, most breweries use plastic six-rings to bind together cans of beer for transportation with Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) and Polypropylene (PP) the most commonly used.

While other alternatives to plastics do exist such as cardboard carriers, they aren’t as environmentally friendly as Saltwater’s new packaging as they require trees to be chopped down. Saltwater’s packaging is made from entirely digestible materials such as barley and wheat which are leftovers from their brewing process. The brewery hopes that other beer manufacturers will follow suit and drive down the price to make LDPE a thing of the past.

We take recycling seriously at LSPS. For more information or to find out how we can help with your waste disposal efforts, please visit our website or call us on freephone 0800 083 7807.

Recycling batteries – why it’s important

EU targets agreed to more than a decade ago mean that the countries in the European Union must be collecting and recycling at least 45% of batteries by September 2016, but why it is so important for batteries to be recycled?

Batteries are destructive to the environment
We use batteries in our homes and workplaces for a number of different reasons, using them to power everything from grooming products, to household tools and expensive gadgets. In fact there are around 200 million AA batteries sold every year in the UK.

However what you may not know is that batteries are made up from materials which can be poisonous to the environment, should they end up at a landfill.

Household batteries often contain toxic materials such as mercury and cadmium which can leak from their casings once exposed to air and water. This leakage can be very harmful to water supplies, soil and local wildlife.

What can you do?
While some supermarket chains have introduced battery bins at their stores, the best way that you can stop batteries from ending up at landfill is to reduce your consumption, something which is surprisingly easy to do.

There are a wide range of rechargeable batteries on the market that you can power up again and again without contributing to landfill waste and the harm that it can cause. Alternatively you can use ‘high drain’ batteries which will last longer and therefore drive down your consumption levels.

However, if you wish to stick with cheap throwaway batteries then be sure to drop them off at your local supermarket or other nearest battery bin so that the useful metals such as steel, zinc and manganese can be properly recycled.

We take recycling seriously at LSPS and help individuals across Leicestershire to reduce the amount of waste that ends up at landfill sites. For more information or to find out how we can help with your waste disposal efforts, please visit our website or call us on freephone 0800 083 7807.

Tesco to commit to food waste donation scheme

UK supermarket giant Tesco has announced that it will commit to a scheme to donate all of their unsold food waste to local charities. Tesco has teamed up with the food distribution charity FareShare to deliver unsold food which is approaching its best-before date to charity groups across the UK.

Tesco began trialling the scheme last year in 10 stores across the UK but have now committed to a nationwide rollout of the scheme which is said to have generated 50,000 meals over the last month with food that would previously have been sent to animal feed and energy plants.

The move comes after increasing pressure on supermarket chains to tackle food waste, a trend popularised by government legislation in France which forced French supermarket chains to give away their food waste to charities.

FareShare will take surplus food from Tesco stores to their 20 regional centres across the UK where it is then divided up between over 2,000 charities including breakfast clubs, homeless hostels and women’s refuges.

We take recycling seriously at LSPS and help individuals across Leicestershire to reduce the amount of waste that ends up at landfill sites. For more information or to find out how we can help with your waste disposal efforts, please visit our website or call us on freephone 0800 083 7807.

An innovative way of recycling chewing gum

In terms of the amount of time and money that it costs, chewing gum is among one of the most draining forms of littering for councils across the UK. The Local Goverment Association which represents councils said that the cost for cleaning up gum from pavements costs around £60 million every year and has urged manufacturers to foot the bill.

While many councils have turned to jet-washing, expensive ad campaigns and providing recycled paper sheets to fold around gum, the problem continues with councils in cities such as Manchester spending almost £40,000 on clean-up operations, removing enough gum to cover a dozen football pitches.

However, an innovative new method of tackling the problem of chewing gum waste has been revealed which involves recycling it than just removing it and send it to landfill sites.

The Gumdrop bin which was thought up by UK designer Anna Bullus promises to tackle gum litter by collecting gum in the street and recycling it into useful products.

The pink bubble shaped bins are placed in strategic spots throughout cities and towns where chewing gum is a big problem and they are shaped like pink bubbles in an attempt to encourage people to dispose of their gum in them. The gum is then recycled into a new plastic polymer called BRGP (Bullus Recycled Gum Polymer) which can be used to make a variety of products including wellington boots, mobile phone covers, stationary, packaging and more ‘Gumdrop’ bins!

For more information on waste recycling and disposal services, please visit our website or call us on our free phone number 0800 083 7807.