Breaking Cast-Iron Bath

[Pete Zahut]

Well, having seen some of your posts regarding your other half, I'm rather upset that your comparing me to him - I truly don't know how you put up with the man :-(

However, my reason for having the bath resurfaced was not because I'm tight or anything but because it's a brilliant bath with historic and sentimental value, it's far bigger, better and of course, not flimsy like a modern bath. My parents are both dead now and when we inherited their house, we had it refurbished and now rent it out. My dad installed that bath himself 59 years ago, which was 7 years before I was born. If a bath can be described as fantastic, that truly is a fantastic bath. If it would fit here in our own house we would have had it in a heartbeat, but sadly, it wouldn't - and we have an inferior, modern, acrylic one.

[Geo]

Blimey - must have got £40 for it then...

[littlenick]

I agree with the last comment. I nearly threw out my 40-year old bath last year, but my OH insisted on restoration instead. So glad he did. It looks amazing, much better than anything I could have bought new for the price!. I went with shirebathreenamelling.co.uk. I would definitely recommend giving them a ring.

[Martin Bonner]

You have. That's OK provided they actually took the waste to the tip (*). The problem is if they dumped the waste somewhere - if the council can identify you from the waste, they can and will come after you.

(*) Of course, technically I suspect they would be taking commercial waste to the tip rather than household, but meeh.

[Adrian C]

Guys looked like building folks, not complete chancers. Just crossing fingers and hope they did the decent thing.

Yeah, I know that's not quite a defence - and I've been at the other end of the crime years ago where someone dumped masses of identifiable material and a railway sleeper (of all things!) at the back of my garage, which required shifting by us into a skip generously paid for by Harrow council. The land affected was non-council land and we've all clubbed together to install locked gates which have completely stopped repeat occurances of this nuisance.

The problem is if they dumped the waste somewhere - if the

That's OK, I'm safe me thinks - I'm not on the DNA register and if they put scrapings from the rubbish in a petri dish and grew it, I somehow doubt it would look like me :-)

Harrow's waste policy is bananas.

Allowing organisations, charities and individuals access to recycle rubbish _before_ it gets carted away to materials reclaim and landfill should be a done thing. Of course it's H&S that forces me to find and buy strange computer parts on eBay rather than collect freely them from discarded PC boxes on the Tip.

Other more enlightened councils do allow their interested residents to tip coins for tat. Harrow (and Hillingdon), forget it :-(

[Clive George]

When I asked our council why they had a similar policy, they gave me this reply. Didn't really make me any happier though.

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RESALE OF WASTE GOODS ? Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) Thank you for your query into the resale of waste goods at HWRC sites across the county. In the past waste goods have been sold on site but the decision to cease this practice was taken some time ago, for reasons which I will illustrate. Please note that North Yorkshire County Council is not alone in this decision, the cessation of selling waste goods at HWRCs is now commonplace throughout the country. There is rarely a decision taken that will please everyone. On this occasion, the decision to stop selling goods on sites was a difficult decision that took into account many pros and cons. The factors we took into account included the following:- Reasons to continue to sell goods on site: .. The popularity with some members of the public of the opportunity to buy reused items ? with between 5-10% of customers regularly browsing saleable goods areas .. Some good quality goods were fed back into the local economy .. Income generated by site staff was used to pay wages and offset the price of management fees charged to the Council by management contractors Reasons to stop the sale of goods on site: .. Traffic congestion was a problem at a number of sites ? one of the contributory factors was people remaining on site to browse through goods for sale or even visiting the site purely to do so even when not delivering waste. .. At more than one site we had difficulties with hangers-on who would buy second hand goods to sell on elsewhere. Their presence was often intimidating to site staff and customers, and a number of confrontations occurred that led to complaints to the Council. .. The quality of goods sold gave rise to regular complaints ? this was often directed at the Council and impacted on our reputation. At a number of sites Trading Standards officers were involved in complaints and investigations, and inspectors regularly destroyed items that should not have been sold (car seats, crash helmets, soft toys etc) even though site staff knew that they should not be sold. .. Security was an issue at most sites. Often, saleable goods were left out and this attracted break-ins from people stealing items. .. The planning permission for household waste recycling centres has a light industrial classification, and does not permit retail activities. .. At a number of sites we had issues with the amount of space used for saleable goods. At some sites we even painted areas of the site and inspectors would destroy anything left outside those areas. As we have introduced more recycling schemes at sites with limited space, removing saleable goods areas has freed up space for more recycling containers. .. As a Council we found it difficult to manage sub-sub-contractors who paid for the rights to operate and salvage a site. There were very few sites where the Council?s requirements were carried out effectively side by side with the needs of the site staff to make a profit. .. On a number of occasions we have witnessed waste being accepted from commercial sources if it contained items of value. In these events the Council footed the bill for disposal of non-recycled waste and the site staff made a profit from the items of value. The decision to stop the sale of goods on site was a balanced decision taking into account the points above. The benefits we have seen since the decision was taken include: .. A 5% fall in waste inputs to the network in 2005/6 when a 2% increase was predicted. This 7% swing was mainly due to improved control of commercial waste inputs by salaried staff that did not have to rely on making money from selling goods and accepting commercial waste. .. Customer care has improved across the network of sites ? in part due to staff being able to spend more time interacting with customers because they have spent less time on trying to salvage, repair and sell second hand goods. .. Environment Agency and NYCC inspection results have shown sites are now run more professionally, having seen continuous improvement in inspection scores and an increase in the number of facilities qualifying for reduced annual subsistence fees because of waste management licence compliance performance in the top 10% of sites nationally. .. Recycling rates at the site have increased and we have already achieved a further increase to 58% in the current year. This is due to a combination of factors, including the provision of additional containers and site staff putting more efforts into encouraging segregation of wastes. The savings in landfill tax alone from recycling an additional ~20,000 tonnes of waste has more than offset any financial benefits that were lost when selling of goods on-site was stopped. .. Traffic congestion has eased at a number of the sites that were experiencing difficulties. .. The number of break-ins has fallen because goods are no longer left out. So far in this letter I have referred to the decision to stop selling goods on-site. I would like to point out to you that useful second hand goods are still removed from the majority of sites and sold off-site. Second hand electrical goods are removed from all 19 HWRCs in the network by Wastecare who are contracted by the County Council to do so. In addition, contractors segregate non-electrical goods from the 19 HWRCs they operate. These are sold at auction houses.

[Stephen Mawson]

Many thanks for all the advice. The bath is now removed and down at the dump, thanks to ear-defenders, goggles, lump hammer and pointed cold-chisel. The cast iron was remarkably flexible. I was quoted £130 a ton as scrap so it really wasn't worth the diesel to take it ten miles to the scrap dealer.

Stephen