Paying to dispose of waste at the local tip

When we bought our first home together and started the process of renovating we knew it would be expensive but recently for anyone renovating a home things just got even more expensive due to charges implied at local tips and dumps.

For the first year of our renovation we spent a lot of time and money gutting the property. We hired around 5 skips and loaded these with waste products from the house.

However we weren't able to load old plasterboard into the skip as this needed disposing off separately so we stored all of the waste plasterboard in the garage and borrowed a van to take this all to the local tip ourselves. Now that we are closer to getting the house finished we no longer have the need to have a skip on the drive however as we are still working on the house there is still waste products that need disposing off. Again we have saved all these up until we have a van load and taken them to the local tip at Newquay.

On arrival we see new fenced off areas which incur additional charges for disposing of waste. This includes Soil, Rubble, Plasterboard, asbestos and Tyres. When we moved into our house the access was completely blocked and had been used as a dumping ground and we removed 7 tyres alone not to mention the rest!

 

We've removed all the internal walls downstairs, the bathroom floor and ceiling all the upstairs bedroom walls and a lot of this was plasterboard. Had we taken this to the tip with the new charges this would have cost us a small fortune. 

Now I am not happy about the charges as for first time buyers and renovators this increases the costs by quite a bit especially when it costs £4.40 per sheet to dispose of. When we ordered in the new plaster board sheets to renovate the whole house we ordered nearly 100 sheets and have added more since the beginning. Which means we have propably removed around the same amount and taking those to the tip now would cost us £100's of pounds to dispose of. 

Whilst recently cycling around the local countryside we have noticed a lot more fly tipping going on especially car tyres and it's no wonder when small businesses are struggling to make money and now incur additionally charges to dispose of rubbish, I understand that items like asbestos require specialist removal and disposal however for the general DIY person or someone doing gardening and removing soil it suddenly becomes expensive to remove waste. We are lucky we are nearly finished on the renovation of our home and most of the work left to complete is decorating but had these charges come into play a few years ago the build cost would have gone up by a few hundred pounds. 

I really hope that these charges do not increase fly tipping in the Cornish countryside, it already costs to gain a permit to access the tip for businesses and those in a van so this additional cost on top just makes things harder for small businesses and I just hope people can afford it and don't fly tip our beautiful region.