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Ever since Steve Coogan’s hapless radio host asked the question during an episode of I’m Alan Partridge, “Who invented the skip?” has become a catchphrase much loved by fans of the show. AP repeatedly asks the question to one caller into his fictitious radio show, until the befuddled listener hazards a guess that the original inventor of skips might have been legendary footballer Bobby Moore. Unsurprisingly, this is not the case. But the show never reveals the answer – which it is likely has its roots in the north-west. The birth of north-west skip hire In a letter to the Guardian’s Notes and Queries column, Stephen Jolly of Milton Keynes suggests that you can find the earliest origins of skip hire in the north-west in the 1920s. Skips were already in use before then, particularly in the mining industry, but the concept of filling a skip and having it taken away by a lorry was a new one, at a time when motor vehicles were also still very new. Mr Jolly writes that Edwin Walker from a lorry manufacturer called Pagefield had a meeting with a borough engineer from Southport. The pair discussed the problem of transporting household waste to the nearest landfill site, as horse-drawn carts were struggling to keep up with demand. Walker’s solution was a horse-drawn skip with a capacity of 300 cubic feet – equivalent to about 11 cubic yards or 100-110 bin bags. Once full, this could be winched on to a Pagefield lorry and driven the longer distance to where it needed to be dumped out. In 1926 the first system that did not require any involvement by horses was launched, and Mr Jolly’s letter also notes that demand for skip hire was increased over the years by uptake of DIY as a hobby and the continuing need to maintain Victorian properties. Present-day skip hire in the north-west Nowadays there is good availability of skip hire in the north-west and operators like J Dickinson & Sons are proud to continue to support householders in their DIY adventures, as well as the professional trades. Skips still serve their original purpose – collecting large quantities of bulky waste materials in a convenient way, both on-site to keep things tidy and when it is time to transport them to an appropriate disposal facility. One big change is that domestic and commercial skip hire waste is not just taken to landfill anymore. Instead it is transported to a suitable recycling facility where it is sorted and processed ready for reuse. Materials that cannot be recycled are instead used in energy generating systems, helping to ensure that skip hire waste disposal is a closed-loop process. Even more recently, the “Who invented the skip?” clip has found a new home as part of the Unsung Heroes feature on the BBC Radio 5 live Friday afternoon show hosted by Elis James and John Robins. So if you’ve heard the question and never knew the answer – now you know who invented skips as we know them today.

The latest fly-tipping statistics from Defra show an increase in illegal dumping of waste, most of which is from households, and an astonishing number of enforcement actions carried out in 2018-19. According to the report, in the 12 months ending March 2019, there were: Over a million fly-tipping incidents, up 8% year-on-year. A 2% increase in incidents involving household waste, to 62% of all cases. Nearly half a million enforcement actions carried out, up 1%. Of those enforcement actions, 15% involved fixed penalty notices, an 11% increase over the previous year to 76,000 penalties issued in total. More than 2,000 people were fined for illegal fly-tipping, with the total value of those fines up by nearly 30% over the previous year to a staggering £1,090,000. A million pound problem It’s really hard to overstate the potential impact on your family finances if a ‘man with a van’ dumps your household waste by the roadside, on a public footpath or down a back alley. Often the first sign you’ll have that something is wrong is when a utility bill or envelope with your name and address is found among fly-tipped waste and you get that knock at the door. If you didn’t take enough precautions to find out where your waste would be taken, you could still be liable for it as if you had fly-tipped it yourself. That’s why it’s essential to work with a reputable skip hire provider who can make sure you get all the paperwork you need to prove that you have disposed of your waste responsibly. Household waste Duty of Care Your responsibility to dispose of household waste correctly falls under the Duty of Care, which applies to all residences and businesses alike. For domestic waste there are some exemptions, but it’s still important to get a Waste Transfer Notice when you hire someone to take away your household rubbish beyond your regular wheelie bin collections. This is especially true if you’re having any work done on your property. If you have a tradesperson like a plumber, plasterer, electrician or carpenter do any work for you, any waste materials they leave behind are commercial waste. Because of this, you need to be aware of the full commercial waste Duty of Care and hire a skip suitable for waste materials generated through business activities rather than regular domestic waste. Skip it, don’t tip it We have a range of skips for hire in different sizes and suitable for domestic and commercial waste alike, so please contact us if you have any questions about the right skip for the job. Of course we dispose of all waste correctly, but our commitment goes beyond that, with a long-term goal to send zero waste to landfill. That means when you dispose of household waste using J Dickinson & Sons skip hire, you not only get the paperwork you need, but you also get peace of mind that you are doing everything you can to minimise the impact of your waste on the environment.

When you hire a skip, you’ll notice the different skip sizes are given in two different ways. The first is cubic yards, and even though many other weights and measures now use the metric system, you’ll rarely see skip sizes quoted in cubic metres. It’s a bit of a throwback, but it’s the way it’s always been done, and it means those people who have worked in the trades their whole lives can still hire a skip and know exactly what they’re getting. The conversion to metric isn’t too difficult anyway – a cubic yard is about three quarters of a cubic metre, and working the other way around, a cubic metre is about 1.3 cubic yards. But the other way skip sizes are measured is ‘bin bags’, and if you’re a domestic skip hire customer this might be more useful for you. Why we measure skip sizes in bin bags Skip sizes are given in bin bags because it’s a familiar and easy to imagine unit of measurement for household skip hire customers. Everyone has an idea of what a full black bag of rubbish looks like, but you might not be sure of exactly how much rubbish fills one cubic yard or one cubic metre. So taking our smallest skips as an example, for many domestic skip hire customers – and plenty of trade skip hire customers too – it’s easier to think of 20-25 bin bags’ worth than it is to imagine two cubic yards. You might notice that there’s a pattern there, as a four cubic yard skip can hold 45-50 bin bags and an eight cubic yard skip can hold 80-90. Basically, one cubic yard is roughly ten black bags of rubbish – again making cubic yards a handy unit to use, as you just multiply by ten and you know exactly how many bags your skip can take. Other ways to measure skip sizes We always aim to make it as easy as possible for you to hire the right size of skip, which is why on our website you’ll find plenty of other ways to measure skip sizes. There’s cubic yards and ‘bin bags’ for each of our skips, but you’ll also see a set of other dimensions for every skip too. Among these extra measurements is the metric volume in cubic metres, plus the skip’s length, height and width in metric and imperial units. These are often even more helpful than knowing the total capacity, as you might need the length and width to decide if a skip will fit through your gate or on your driveway. And the height is important too, as it’s unsafe for us to collect an overloaded skip – so you should always make sure that the maximum safe fill line is high enough for any rubbish you need to put inside. It’s a lot of information for each skip, but we hope that by giving you all of the different measurements, you can know exactly what size of skip to hire – and how many bags of rubbish you can fit in it too.