Somewhere in every skip we collect around Ormskirk there is plastic. Broken garden chairs, old guttering and downpipes, toy boxes, storage crates, uPVC offcuts from a window job, plant pots by the dozen. Customers regularly ask us, as they watch the wagon lift the skip, whether any of it actually gets recycled or whether it all ends up buried. Because the load comes back to our own facility rather than disappearing into someone else’s supply chain, we can answer from direct experience. This is the honest, unvarnished journey of the plastic in your Ormskirk skip, from your driveway onwards.
The first sort happens at our own yard
Every skip we collect in the Ormskirk area is tipped at our own recycling operation, not at a third-party transfer station. The load is spread and worked through by machine and by hand, and this first sort is where plastic gets its chance. Large rigid items are the easy wins. Garden furniture, crates, wheelie bin bodies, pipework and uPVC sections are picked off the line and set into their own stream. Plastic sheeting and film gets pulled separately where it is clean enough to matter. What determines each item’s fate is not whether it is plastic but what kind of plastic it is and what condition it arrives in, which is where the story gets more interesting than the recycling logos suggest.
Rigid plastics are the success story
Hard, chunky plastics do well. Items like crates, pipes, window frames and garden furniture are mostly made from a handful of polymer families that reprocessors actively want, and once separated they are baled and sent on to specialist plants where they are shredded, washed, sorted by polymer, and melted into pellets. Those pellets come back into the world as new pipes, garden products, damp proof membranes and street furniture. uPVC from window and fascia jobs is a particular success, since the offcuts from a replacement window project in Ormskirk can quite literally end up inside new window profile. If your skip load leans heavily towards big rigid plastic, keeping it unbagged and loose in the skip helps our pickers spot and recover it.
Films, wraps and mixed mouldings are harder work
The difficult end of the stream is thin and mixed material. Carrier bags, wrapping film, laminated packaging, brittle weathered plastics that crumble when handled, and small mouldings made from blended polymers are costly to separate and often too degraded to reprocess. Contamination matters too, because plastic caked in soil, paint or plaster from a renovation may cost more to clean than the recovered material is worth. Material in this category that cannot be recycled economically does not simply get buried, though. Much of it is directed into energy recovery, where it is used as fuel in place of fossil sources. Burying material in the ground is the very last resort at our facility, and the fraction of a typical Ormskirk skip that ends there has fallen year on year as sorting technology and offtake markets for recovered material have steadily improved year on year.
What this means for how you load your skip
None of this requires you to sort your waste, and taking mixed loads is the whole point of a skip. A few habits do raise how much of your plastic gets recovered. Keep large plastic items whole rather than smashing them small, since our line recovers what it can recognise. Empty soil out of plant pots and troughs. Keep plastics out of rubble where you can, because a crate buried in hardcore is lost to the picker. And never bag up recyclable plastic inside black sacks, which cannot be opened item by item at a working line. There is more on how we handle whole loads on our environmental and recycling page, and the same principles apply to timber, metal and cardboard as to plastic. None of it changes the price of your hire, and every recognisable item recovered at the line is one less thing heading to the residual stream.
The plastics that should never go in the skip at all
A small group of plastic-adjacent items need different routes entirely. Whole electrical items with plastic casings, from televisions to kettles, are electrical waste and are collected under their own scheme rather than through a mixed skip. Plastic containers still holding paint, oil or chemicals are treated as their contents, not their material, and stay out. Polystyrene in quantity is worth mentioning when you book. If a clear out at your home will produce a lot of any of these, tell us and we will point each one to the right destination before the skip arrives rather than turning material away at the yard. Sizes and options for the skip itself are on our skip sizes page.
Recycling that you can actually check
Because we run our own operation minutes from the town rather than contracting disposal out, our licence numbers are on our paperwork and the answer to what happened to your waste is never a shrug. That accountability is worth as much as the recycling rate itself. For your next clear out, renovation or garden project anywhere around Ormskirk, call the team on 01704 779345 or reach us through our contact page and your plastic, along with everything else, will be handled by people you can hold to the answer.
