Children are very good at outgrowing furniture. The cot becomes a toddler bed, the toddler bed becomes bunk beds, and one day the bunk beds go and a desk arrives. Somewhere along the way the sofa that survived the baby years gives up, and the playroom bean bag finally goes flat.
Getting all of that out of the house depends, more than most families realise, on which side of a borough boundary they live. Since June, every household in Merton can have up to three large items taken away free once a year. In Richmond, a collection of up to five items costs £85. In Kingston, it is £43 for up to four. And the things the councils refuse to collect turn out to be, almost exactly, the things a skip is for.
Two halves of a London clear-out: the council and skip hire
A family clear-out usually produces two different kinds of waste. There are the big household items that are awkward to carry but come out whole, and there is the broken-up material that appears when a room is changed. In London, they leave the house by different routes.
Among the things easySkip’s London skip hire service will not take are sofas, armchairs, upholstered headboards and mattresses, along with fridges and freezers. Richmond Council’s bulky collection rules draw the same line from the other side: the council will collect furniture and mattresses, but not waste from construction, demolition or preparatory works, such as rubble, fitted kitchen units, bathtubs and doors. For larger amounts of that, it tells residents to use a registered waste collection company or hire a licensed skip. Most skip hire firms are set up for exactly that half of the job: the fitted wardrobe, the old kitchen, the bath, the tiles and the timber.
Put the two lists side by side and they fit together almost perfectly, which is the most useful thing to know before booking either. Almost, because a few things belong to neither, and because the three boroughs do not draw their lines in quite the same place.
Merton: free, once a year, three items
Merton’s offer is the simplest. Since 1 June, every household in the borough can book one free bulky waste collection of up to three items a year. The council will collect beds, sofas, armchairs and freestanding wardrobes, fridges, freezers, ovens and dishwashers, and even a roll of carpet, cut into manageable lengths, with its underlay. After the free collection, further collections of up to three items cost £39.75, and four to six items cost £66.
Councillor Ross Garrod, the Leader of Merton Council, said at the launch that the free collections would make it “easier than ever to get rid of old sofas, broken fridges, and mattresses that have seen better days”.
Three items is not many, so it pays to choose them carefully. The best candidates are the things with no other way out of the house: anything upholstered, a mattress, a fridge. A bed frame can be broken down for the skip. A sofa can’t. Items go out by 6am on collection day, inside the boundary of the property rather than on the pavement.
Richmond: £85 for five, and a clear line on building waste
Richmond charges £85 for up to five items, and £9.90 for each item after that. Residents over 60 pay £29 for five, and households receiving benefits including Universal Credit, Housing Benefit and Pension Credit Guarantee Credit can have up to two collections a year free. All types of mattress are accepted, as are furniture and white goods, but fridges and freezers are booked separately.
Items need to be clearly visible in the front garden, and can only go out onto the street after 8.30pm the evening before collection. Small quantities of building waste from a home can go to the Townmead Road recycling centre. Anything larger goes back to the council’s advice quoted above.
Kingston: £43 for up to four, and the bath can go
Kingston charges £43 for one to four items and £71 for five to eight. Its list differs at the bathroom end: baths, sinks and toilets are accepted, along with sofas, wardrobes, mattresses, bed frames and white goods, fridges and freezers included. Doors, kitchen and bathroom units, boilers and radiators, fence panels, garden waste and DIY waste such as bricks, tiles, timber and plasterboard are not. Items must be out by 6.30am, visible and easy to reach from the road.
Why the sofa can’t simply go in the skip
The rule behind the sofa is not a matter of preference. Under Environment Agency guidance for England, waste upholstered domestic seating may contain persistent organic pollutants, such as the brominated flame retardants used in some foam and fabrics, and it has to be incinerated. It must not go to landfill, and it has to be kept apart from other waste at every stage, from the home to the bay at a recycling centre. A skip is mixed waste by definition.
The definition is wider than most people expect. It covers sofas, sofa beds, armchairs, recliners, upholstered kitchen and dining chairs, stools and footstools, futons, bean bags, and floor and sofa cushions. In family terms, the nursing chair and the playroom bean bag both count. Mattresses, beds and curtains do not, and nor does a plain wooden chair with no padding or fabric.
Mattresses fall outside that rule, but they are usually kept out of skips anyway, and all three councils collect them. Townmead Road in Richmond takes them for recycling too.
What goes where, item by item
Let’s see where each type of item goes, one by one:
- Sofas, armchairs, the nursing chair, bean bags. The council collection, or a new home if they are still in good condition. Never the skip.
- Mattresses, from cot to double. The council collection, in all three boroughs.
- Fridges and freezers. Part of a bulky collection in Merton and Kingston. A separate booking in Richmond.
- Bed frames, freestanding wardrobes, chests of drawers. The council will take them whole. Broken down, they can go in a skip instead, saving the council’s limited slots for things with no other route.
- Fitted wardrobes, kitchen units, doors, tiles and timber. All three councils treat these as building or DIY waste and leave them out of their collections. This is what a skip is for.
- The bath, basin and toilet. A skip, unless you live in Kingston, where the bulky collection will take them.
- Plasterboard. Neither. All three councils exclude it from their collections, and standard skips usually exclude it too. It needs its own route, which normally means the recycling centre.
- Carpet. Merton will collect a roll, cut into lengths, with its underlay. In Richmond it counts as building waste, and small amounts can go to Townmead Road.
- The Wendy house nobody plays in any more. Richmond’s recycling centre classes garden and play sheds and Wendy houses as construction and demolition waste, and Merton’s collection excludes shed panels and timber. Broken up, it belongs in a skip.
Getting both out without a clash
The order matters. Book the council collection first, because the council sets the date, and Merton said at launch that bookings would be handled on a first come, first served basis. Then plan the skip around whatever is left.
Keep the two piles apart from the first day. A sofa parked next to a skip has a habit of ending up in it, and under the rules above it should never get there. If the clear-out comes with a room change, a nursery becoming a big-kid bedroom, say, or a playroom being turned into somewhere for a teenager to avoid everyone, the council takes the furniture and the skip takes the strip-out.
Two lists, one house
Children will go on outgrowing things for years, and every stage leaves something behind. In Merton, Richmond and Kingston, the simplest way to think about it is this: the council takes away what the family sat and slept on, and the skip takes away what the room was made of.
Image: Depositphotos
