From 1st January 2023, any item of upholstered furniture will no longer be accepted at landfill and must be destroyed through incineration due to the potential of containing Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). This includes:

· sofas

· sofa beds

· armchairs

· kitchen and dining room chairs

· stools and foot stools

· home office chairs

· futons

· bean bags, floor and sofa cushions

· mattresses

· divan beds

To comply with this Environment Agency guidance, changes must be made to how this waste is collected and handled.

At Our House Clearance, if an upholstered piece of furniture is removed from a property, we have always tried to find alternative solutions to sending them to landfill. This is done by:

Donation

We try to donate as much furniture as possible but due to guidelines set by the charities themselves this is not always possible. The guidelines they set include such things as; sofas and chairs must be in good condition and have fire safety labels still attached, and mattresses must be in perfect condition with no stains or blemishes.

Resale

If the furniture is not accepted by the charities, but is still in good condition, we choose to sell the furniture over disposing it as waste, because although the charities do not want them, they are still useful to people who can’t or don’t want to buy new items. The reason we resell rather than give them away is because the time and effort it takes to move these items does incur overheads that we recoup from the cost of the sale.

Sadly, you would be surprised by how much doesn’t fit into either of these categories, and therefore must end up being disposed of as trade waste.

As a business carrying a waste carriers’ licence, we have a legal duty to dispose of any trade waste correctly and ethically and this comes at a cost because we must pay for disposal of any waste. This has always been the case and is factored into our pricing and we do this through our local waste management centre.

With the new guidelines in place, our supplier no longer accepts upholstered items, therefore we now must dispose of them separately using Council disposal sites. Unfortunately, this creates an additional cost of disposal as the Council also charge for trade waste.

What does this mean for clearances?

At Our House Clearance, if an upholstered piece of furniture is removed from a property, we will continue to find alternative solutions before resorting to disposal, so it is unlikely you will see our costs increase by much if they form part of a larger clearance. When we quote for a clearance, we believe in transparency so we openly breakdown costs involved in the quote, this will always continue.

If you are looking for collection of individual items, we will now ask for more information or images of the item to determine its condition, and you may find that there will be an increased cost for clearance depending on the condition of the item.

Be aware of rogue traders and fly tipping

If a company is collecting these items at a price that seems too good to be true, it probably is. Fly tipping is a continuing issue across the UK because rogue traders collecting your items for next to nothing are most likely fly tipping them to avoid waste costs that all legitimate registered companies must accept. With the new regulations, it is likely that we will also see the number of fly tipping cases increase as it grows harder for companies to dispose of these items without additional costs.

Be careful because fly-tipping is a serious criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted and fined. The penalty for fly-tipping depends on the seriousness of the offence. Offenders can be given a £400 fixed penalty notice for a small-scale offence and in serious cases, prosecution in court can end in either a fine up to £50,000 or 12 months imprisonment.