What happens to your rubbish after we collect it?

When the van pulls away, most people assume their old sofa and bin bags are headed straight for a hole in the ground. For a lot of clearance firms, they are. At Alpha, the journey is rather different — and a good deal more deliberate.

"Take it away" is the easy part. The harder, and far more important, part is what happens next. As a licensed waste carrier we're legally accountable for everything we lift, so we treat each load as a sorting job, not a dumping job. Here's exactly how it works.

1. It's loaded and logged, not just chucked in

Our crews load with sorting in mind — keeping reusable furniture, clean timber, metals and general waste roughly separated from the moment they leave your property. Before we drive off, the job is logged against a Waste Transfer Note, the legal record of who handled your waste and where it's going.

The law calls it your "duty of care" — and it doesn't end when the van leaves. Using a licensed carrier is what keeps that responsibility off your shoulders.

2. It goes to a licensed transfer station

Every load is taken to a permitted waste transfer station — never a lay-by, never a field. These sites are licensed by the environmental regulator for the nation we're working in:

• SEPA in Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen)
• Natural Resources Wales in Wales (Carmarthenshire)
• The Environment Agency in England (Ebbsfleet & Kent)

3. It's sorted by hand and by machine

At the station, mixed loads are broken down into streams: wood, metal, plastics, cardboard, electricals (WEEE), and genuine residual waste. Much of this is done mechanically, but a surprising amount is still picked over by hand to pull out anything reusable.

What gets a second life

• Furniture in good order is routed to reuse networks and charity partners.
• Metals and electricals are recycled through specialist processors.
• Clean timber and green waste become chipboard feedstock or compost.

4. Only the genuine leftovers reach landfill

After sorting, what's left is the small fraction that truly can't be recovered. Across our regions, that currently works out at under 20% of everything we collect — meaning over 80% is diverted from landfill. We're not satisfied with that figure; we'd like it higher, and we report on it honestly rather than rounding up.

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The short version

Your rubbish doesn't vanish — it gets sorted, recovered and recycled wherever possible, with full paperwork proving where it went. That's the difference between a licensed clearance company and a cheap van: not just that it's gone, but that you know it went somewhere it should.