The Used Kitchen Company Says “Call Time on Kitchen Skipping”
Over the last weekend in March, when British Summer Times arrives, sustainability champion The Used Kitchen Company (www.theusedkitchencompany.com) wants us to call time on the ‘skipping’ of unwanted kitchens and save ourselves money into the bargain.
TUKC’s first ‘No Skip Sunday’ on March 28 reminds those tackling a kitchen refurbishment that much of the UK’s skipped kitchen waste simply cannot be processed and recycled and is dead weight.
TUKC’s CEO, Looeeze Grossman says, “Many people say, “Oh, I am already recycling my kitchen, because I’m sending it to a recycling plant. What they don’t realise is that this will result in much of their old kitchen being dumped in landfill. The only true way to recycle a kitchen is to sell it on to another home.”
The fact is that around 5m tonnes of waste wood is generated each year in the UK. Only 1,400,000 is recycled – just 28%.[1]
Whilst we may think all wood is wood and can be burned or reprocessed, kitchen ‘wood’ is often treated, painted, full of glues that contaminate the recycling process or, most often, MDF and totally unrecyclable. Wood waste needs to be hand-sorted and that rarely happens.
Kitchen materials’ waste is also often filled with nails and bolts and other metals that make it too expensive to process, so it again just ends up in the landfill heap, helping to release harmful gases, destroy animal habitats and contaminate waterways.
No Skip Sunday is about making us think about this and choosing a path that does not result in a kitchen’s early death at landfill, but which gives it another life, in another home.
By photographing your kitchen before removing it, noting down its features and listing it for sale at www.theusedkitchencompany.com you can earn some extra cash to put towards your new kitchen, save on skip hire costs and any tipping fees, and be kind to the environment.
You might even find your dream designer kitchen via TUKC, saving yourself a hefty 50-70% off the kitchen’s original RRP and with the possibility of top-end appliances also being included in the sale. You could buy the designer kitchen you’ve yearned for, upgrading your lifestyle by buying ‘recycled’ and still keeping lots of cash in the bank.
The No Skip Sunday approach is an eco-friendly one and will this year relieve some strain for recycling centres struggling with Covid-19 pressures.
