Recycling Leftover Tenancy

Tenancy over, you move in to clean your property. If you’re lucky, you’ll have had a clean, careful tenant who took a pride in their home. Unfortunately that’s not always likely.

Invariably you’ll open the door to your rental property and push your way past a pile of free papers, walk into the kitchen to find a bin overflowing and a row of bottles lining a window. Sound familiar?

Of course this is a great moment to call your favourite end-of-tenancy cleaners , but it’s also a chance to take a look at the recycling options you provide for your tenants. Maybe a bit of pro-action will mean this is the last time you’ll be walking in on this mess.

Over 30 million tonnes of waste comes out of the UK every year, and only around 20% of it is recycled. Around 50% of waste is recycled in Eurozone. Funnily enough, it’s not a difficult task if you have systems in place to make recycling easy.

When you next have to renovate the kitchen, consider building in a recycling system into one of the cupboards: simply a number of different coloured bins should encourage your tenants to separate plastics, paper, tin, compostable waste and genuine rubbish. Ikea has a pull-out cupboard that organizes them so your new tenant won’t have to really think about the recycling – just do it naturally.
Buy a compost bin for the garden and even consider reducing rent for a well-maintained compost heap: you can sell the great quality fertilizer that it breaks down into. Have a small poster in the kitchen with the things that can be put in the compost bin: animal fur and human hair, animal bedding and feed, egg shells, veg and fruit peelings and cores, mown grass and dead plants, tea bags and coffee grains and leaves swept from the path.
By the time your tenant has sorted the recyclables in different bins, the actual ‘rubbish’ that can’t be recycled is remarkably little.

Contact your council to find out how they prefer to collect recyclable waste and ask for a calendar of collection times to be delivered to the house (it’s unlikely that the previous tenants will have kept that piece of paper!).

For now, of course, you probably have piles of rubbish and recyclables in your rental house, so take this as the opportunity to make a start with recycling. When you contact the council for the timetable, ask for them to deliver all the bins possible to your house. They will probably be able to pick up any white goods and bulky items that you need to get rid of as well. Explain the state of the house and ask the council what they suggest, to help you recycle effectively and quickly, so you can get your next, far more careful, tenants in and get the rent coming in again.