The difference between this and hiring a skip is who does the loading. An excavator fills a tipper in a fraction of the time it takes two people with a wheelbarrow, and when we drive off the site is empty — no bin sitting on the nature strip for a week collecting the neighbourhood’s rubbish.
What we cart away
- Builders’ waste
- Offcuts, plasterboard, packaging, broken brick, formwork and the general accumulation of a job that has run six weeks longer than planned.
- Green waste
- Prunings, felled timber, hedge and tree waste, and the results of a garden clean-up that outgrew the green bin.
- Soil and spoil
- Excavation spoil, excess fill, and the mound left behind by whoever dug the last job and did not take it with them.
- Concrete and rubble
- Broken slab, path, brick and masonry. Heavy, but the cheapest material per tonne to dispose of because it is recyclable.
- General household junk
- Garage and shed clear-outs, deceased estates, and the contents of a property that needs to be empty by Friday.
How it is priced
Two things set the number, and it helps to know which one is driving yours.
Volume decides how many tipper loads the job takes — a load is a round trip, and round trips are time. Weight decides what the tip charges when we get there, and the tip does not care how neatly it is stacked.
Those two pull in opposite directions depending on the material. A trailer of broken concrete is dense and heavy but goes to a recycler cheaply. A trailer of mixed household rubbish weighs a fraction of that and costs considerably more to dispose of, because it is bound for landfill. This is why a quote for “a trailer load” is meaningless without knowing what is in it, and why a photo answers the question in seconds.
Tipping fees are inside the quoted price. An invoice that grows after the job because of a disposal charge nobody mentioned is not how this works.
Skip bin or truck?
A skip makes sense when you are generating waste over days or weeks and want somewhere to put it as you go — a renovation, a slow owner-builder job.
A truck makes sense when the waste already exists, is heavy or awkward, and you would rather not load it yourself. It is also the only option when there is nowhere legal to put a bin, or when the material is too heavy to fill a skip without exceeding what it can be lifted at.
What we cannot take
Being clear about this up front saves everyone a wasted morning.
- Asbestos. We do not remove it and we do not guess about it. Fibro sheeting on an old shed, sheet lining behind a bathroom, some eaves and some old fencing are all candidates. It has to be removed by a licensed asbestos removalist and taken to a facility licensed to receive it. If something on your site looks like it might be, stop and get it identified — that is not caution, it is the law and the sensible thing besides.
- Paint, solvents and fuels. These go through household chemical collection, not a tip.
- Gas bottles, car batteries and tyres. All have their own disposal streams, and most transfer stations take them separately.
Everything else in a normal house, yard or building site is fair game.
What happens to it
Where the load makes sorting worthwhile, it gets sorted. Clean concrete, brick and soil go to a recycler. Scrap metal goes to a metal yard. Green waste goes to a green waste facility. What is genuinely mixed and genuinely rubbish goes to the tip.
The honest limit: nobody hand-sorts a mixed trailer of household junk on the way to the transfer station, and any operator who tells you they do is selling you something. Keeping streams separate on site — a pile of clean concrete here, green waste there — is what actually gets material recycled, and it is worth doing if you have the room, because it usually costs less to dispose of too.
Often booked with
Rubbish removal is rarely the whole job. It is normally the back half of a land clearing job, or it arrives with a furniture removal because the garage turned out to hold more than furniture. Booked together it is one visit and one price, which is materially cheaper than two.