Today and yesterday Charlie and I made several trips to the tip to get rid of the waste from our bathroom re-modelling. When we arrived at the tip in Metcalf Way we discovered that the new tip is open and the old one next door has closed down.

The new one is so much better than the old one. The old one was just a yard with two rows of large skips. Whenever there was a need to move skips about or use a JCB to do anything the place was closed, or cars had to squeeze into a side area while the heavy plant was moving around. All for sound safety reasons no doubt, but it always made the lengthy queues even longer.

The new place is a large oval building with a road circling it. The road goes up a ramp leading to a series of hatches at the back. Instead of having to carry rubbish up steps to drop it in a skip you just throw it through the low hatches into the building. The staff can crush, move and scoop up the rubbish using all their bulldozers and everything within the building without holding anything up.

Just to make it even better, the roof of the building extends over the roadway so even if it is pissing down like it was today you don’t need to get soaked while unloading the car or van. Mind you, we were already soaked from loading the car up in the rain, but it is an improvement.

Of course we made sure to find a hatch which had a long drop to bare concrete under it for dumping the old toilet, cistern and sink 🙂 The whole thing is long overdue, but worth the wait.

I don’t know what is going to happen to the site of the old dump. Is it big enough for a new fire station instead of using the land at Cheal’s roundabout? The new facility is partly built on what was a school playing field (ie free land for the county council) and it frees up valuable space in the industrial site. Moving the fire station frees up valuable land on the leisure park. Couldn’t the proceeds of both bits of land go towards procuring a better site for a new fire station than Cheal’s?

The other thing we noticed on our tip runs was that the travellers are back behind Halfords. Huge earth bunds were put where they usually park, but these bunds were built so that there is still room in front of them for a caravan or two, so they don’t seem to be a very successful design… maybe the old amenity tip should be opened up for caravans? It already reminds me a bit of the traveller’s site in Lewisham with the brick walls around it.