3 to 4 Tonnes a Week: What Really Happens to the Contents of a Cleared London Home

Every clearance company in London claims to be eco-friendly these days. Most of them cannot tell you what that actually means in practice.

I am going to give you a number I have not put in writing before. Most weeks, Clear It Out diverts approximately 3 to 4 tonnes of cleared items away from landfill. Not through clever marketing. Through resale and donation. Through running the business in a way that treats reuse as the default rather than the exception.

That number is an honest estimate, not a tracked metric. We do not have a system that weighs everything we send back out the door. But after doing 350 to 450 clearances a year across London, Surrey and Kent, I know roughly what a week looks like. And I know that what goes back into circulation is a significant part of what we take out.

Before I started Clear It Out in 2014, I spent years as a reseller. I was on the buying side, sourcing items from clearance companies and auctions to sell on eBay. That work gave me a very clear view of something that bothered me.

The volume of usable, saleable, genuinely valuable things being sent straight to landfill was enormous. Items that had decades of life left in them. Items that people would have been glad to own. Gone, because the business model of most clearance companies at the time did not leave room for the extra work involved in recovering them.

Clear It Out was built to do it differently. Not as a marketing position. As the actual operating model.

After a clearance, loads come back to our warehouse in Wallington. That is where the sorting happens. Items are assessed for condition, saleability and the likelihood of finding a buyer. What can be resold is pulled out first. That is not just good for the environment; it is how the business runs.

Resale is always the first call. Items that can be donated go next. What is left, the things that genuinely cannot find a new home, gets disposed of legally and responsibly, in line with our waste carrier licence.

The range of what finds a new home is broader than most people expect. Furniture in good condition. Electricals that still work. Books, clothing, tools. Raw building materials such as timber, hardware and paint that tradespeople can actually use. In some cases, items that would not find buyers in the UK get passed to partners who distribute goods to developing countries. What cannot be reused gets broken down into recyclable material streams rather than going to general waste.

A full house clearance does not produce a lorry load of rubbish. It produces a lorry load of sorted material, some of which has real value and most of which can be handled more responsibly than a skip.

We donate regularly to Emmaus and British Heart Foundation. Both organisations know how to move second-hand goods at scale, and they provide a reliable route for items that do not make commercial sense to resell ourselves but that still have a useful life ahead of them.

To be straight with you: resale comes before donation. That is not a contradiction of the charitable angle. It is how we stay profitable, and staying profitable is how we keep prices at a level that works for customers. A business that haemorrhages money on goodwill operations does not last long enough to do any good.

The honest version of our sustainability model is this: we recover value where we can, we pass items on through charitable routes where recovery does not make sense commercially, and we dispose of what is genuinely at the end of its life. That order is not accidental.

In 2022 we received Green Mark Level 1 accreditation. Green Mark is an internationally recognised environmental certification for businesses that want to verify their environmental credentials to clients and staff.

The process required us to build a framework for monitoring and reducing our emissions, and to set out our environmental policies in writing. That means committing to continuously improving our environmental performance, measuring and acting on our carbon footprint, and managing the waste generated by our own operations.

I would not claim that receiving an accreditation makes us perfect. What it does is hold us to a documented standard. And it means the sustainability claims in this article have been assessed by an external body, not just written by a company marketing itself.

Disposal costs money. It has risen significantly in recent years, for reasons I covered in an earlier article on why house clearance prices have gone up. Every tonne that does not go to a transfer station reduces the cost of a job.

When we recover saleable items from a clearance, that recovery offsets some of the disposal cost. A property full of items we can resell or donate costs less to clear than one where everything has to go through formal disposal. We pass that difference back to the customer in the price.

This is not a side benefit of the model. It is central to how we price. The reuse-first approach is what allows us to offer competitive rates in a market where disposal costs have risen by around 63 per cent since 2020.

Eco credentials in this industry are easy to claim and difficult to verify. Here are some questions worth asking before you book.

Ask what happens to items after the clearance.
A legitimate operator can tell you in specific terms, not vague reassurances. A company that says everything is recycled without explaining the process has probably not thought about the process.

Ask whether they have a waste carrier licence.
Every legitimate operator in England is registered on the Environment Agency public register. Search by company name before you commit. Our licence number is CBDU176999.

Ask for a waste transfer note.
This is the document that records where your waste went. Without one, you have no evidence that your clearance was handled legally or responsibly.

Check for any environmental certification.
Green Mark, ISO 14001, or similar. It is not a guarantee, but it is evidence that the claims have been externally assessed.

The price difference between a company that genuinely manages waste responsibly and one that is just saying it does is real. So is the environmental difference.

Our house clearance London page covers what we do, how we price and how to get a quote. We operate seven days a week, including bank holidays, across London, Surrey and Kent.

For more on how we handle cleared items, our re-use and recycle scheme page covers the process in detail. For an idea of pricing before you get in touch, our prices page sets out our standard load-based rates. The price we quote is the price you pay.