But? Do stick around!

A combination of a big deadline (exciting project news incoming!), both the children having their birthdays this week and, obvs, the bloody heatwave, mean there will be no newsletter today.

This is Rubbish is the newsletter for people who love interiors but hate waste. Each week I share hard-to-find intel and tips for reusing what you have, sourcing secondhand and buying into the circular economy when doing up your home - from sustainable guttering to sofa disposal and all the ways not to balls up your low-waste kitchen renovation (like I did). There’s also a popular strand where I sift through flytips and pull out the things people really didn’t have to throw away. It’s informative but also sometimes strangely funny as I imagine the stories behind the objects.

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Anyway, I will be back in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, stay in touch - I’d love to know your burning questions on zero waste renovating at all scales. I’m putting together a piece on decorating for my return… and there’s space for your input.

I’m also after photos of your beautiful homes - got a corner of salvage wood shelving? A reclaimed basin? Countertops made from recycled material? A cherished heirloom? Etc. Etc.

DM me here!

Know someone currently redecorating, planning a house project or just loves interiors? Then they might love This is Rubbish! And it’d be amazingly lovely if you you’d tell them about the newsletter and send them a link.

Kate / Rubbish x

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Dive into the archives…

“Saw this and thought of you”: I’m often sent waste-related news by friends, family and readers, and it was one such message this week that prompted today’s round-up of artistic responses to the world’s rapidly rising levels of waste.

Iain Aitch, a writer and social historian, got in touch to tell me about an extraordinary-sounding exhibition he’d just been to in Lisbon, by the artist Jacob Kirkegaard, whose sound installation broadcasts the noise of waste being processed. “It’s kind of hard to describe!” he wrote.

More on Kierkegaard below - along with four more artists working very differently to share the same message: we’re all drowning in rubbish.

SHOJI YAMASAKI - Littered Mvmnts

I’m pretty obsessed with Littered Mvmnts, an Instagram project made up of a series of strange and utterly captivating videos by the interdisciplinary Japanese-American artist, Shoji Yamasaki.

In the mini films the artist, also a choreographer, apes pieces of (strictly inorganic, human-made) rubbish as they move gently in the breeze. You really need to see him in action to understand why this is so mesmerising and affecting. He began working on the project during Covid, while wandering the streets and noticing rubbish moving in the wind “sort of like a dance”.

The project will end, he states in his Instagram biography, once people stop littering and each reel includes the message “Please pick up your litter” in the caption.

Fun fact, Yamasaki also rescues abled and disabled rabbits. An offshoot of this work is a dance he’s developed and named the Lagomorph Technique, or “Bunny Jazz”, which incorporates rabbit body language and which he performs while wearing rabbit ears and tails. Don’t you just LOVE him?

Find Shoji Yamasaki on Instagram @litteredmvmnts

ANTOINE REPÉSSE - 365 Unpacked

“365 Unpacked” began in 2011, when photographer Antoine Repésse stopped throwing away his non recyclable waste, chiefly packaging. He collected 70 cubic meters of rubbish. “The idea is to confront the public with this reality that they are usually able to avoid,” he says in a film about the project that you can watch here. “It’s easy every week to throw your rubbish in the bin and you never know what becomes of it.”

The photographer says he hopes the pictures will encourage people to change their consumption habits

The series got him shortlisted in 3rd place at the 2016 Sony World Photography Awards.

Find Antoine Repésse on Instagram @antoinerepesse

JOSEBA SÁNCHEZ ZABALETA - Territorios de lo Posible

In this series - which translates as ‘territories of possibility’ - Spanish artist Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta depicts imagined desolate wastelands, painted in oils on metre-and-a-half canvases.

His work features no people, yet human existence is at the forefront. “What we leave behind, exposed to the elements of the future, will be our legacy: a contribution made in the image and likeness of the worst creature on earth,” he writes on his website.

His technical approach, as described on Artsy, is, “marked by the subtlety of light and shadow, [which] creates an atmosphere of stillness and introspection, inviting the viewer to contemplate the transient nature of existence.”

Find him on Instagram at @sanchezzabaleta or at Sanchezzabaleta.com.

GREGG SEGAL - 7 Days of Garbage

As the title suggests, each of the photos in “7 Days of Garbage” depicts a friend or acquaintance of American photographer, Gregg Segal, surrounded by just one week’s worth of the rubbish and recyclables they produce.

“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wondered about garbage - where does it go and what happens when we run out of places to put it?” Segal writes on his website. “I’m concerned not only by how much we throw away, but by how blithe we are to the problem.”

Recyclables were included because “much of what is designated recyclable isn’t recycled, recycling plastic has environmental costs, and packaging is excessive.”

The photographer chose natural backdrops - forest, beach, snow, pond - “to suggest the pervasiveness of our trash”

The result is instant archeology, a record not only of our waste, but of our values. Segal himself, with his family, features in one of the shots, below.

As Segal says of his images: “[They] make consumption, excess and waste impossible to ignore.”

Find out more at the online gallery, PHmuseum and on Segal’s website.

Gregg Segal is on Instagram @greggsegal

JACOB KIRKEGAARD - Testimonium

Testimonium is an immersive sound installation by the Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard, who has taken his recording equipment to capture waste streams and their management systems in countries including Denmark, Latvia, Estonia, Greenland, Greece, South Africa and Kenya, exploring landfills, recycling centres and wastewater.

In the Portuguese capital, Kirkegaard recorded noise and footage at Lisbon’s Valorsul waste management centres (worth checking out on Instagram if, like me, you enjoy a good “murf“).

In the artist’s own words, he captured “the massive and pulsating machinery that aims to carry the waste out of sight, smell and mind; the sounds and vibrations from plastics, glass, metals and wastewater with sensors, hydrophones and microphones tuned into the din produced by these materials”.

The result, he continues, is: “A rich and moving portrait of the detritus of modern civilisation.”

The exhibition is on until 18 May 2026 at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon. Follow the artist on Instagram @kirkegaardjacob and find out more about him on his website.

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You might also enjoy reading:

If you’re new to this Substack WELCOME! I write about rubbish and how to avoid it. As a recovering interiors journalist, I also write a strand dedicated to swerving the skip when doing up your house. It’s non-judgey and packed with genuinely helpful tips.

Do join me over on Notes. If you’re not already all over it. Notes is like Twitter from the olden days, but with no risk of Laurence Fox. Click through and hit the follow button to keep up with what I’m reading and writing.

1. The myth of the perfect home

Aside from this being an outstanding quote, it also got me thinking about how craving constant aesthetic change, or perfection, at home (as I do) runs the risk of being a high-waste approach to interiors. I scratch that itch by shopping secondhand, repainting and rearranging the furniture regularly, which drives my family mad, but when I heard about Katie McCrory’s book Where the Heart is: Eight Ways to Transform Your Life at Home, No Matter Where You Live, via sam baker of The Shift, I downloaded the audio version pronto. The Shift piece the quote is from is called The Perfect Home is a Myth. Just finishing the new (AMAZING) and shall then get stuck in and let you know if it helps.

2. The Rightmove Roundup

Journalist Sophie Heawood regularly makes me laugh out loud. Join her at The Sophist for missives including her regular The Rightmove Roundup - literally - a roundup of what she’s found on Rightmove that week. The theme in the post quoted above is homes for sale that have a big but (one ‘t’).

3. Rosie Rainbow, Reuse Strategist

I was hugely inspired after chatting to Rosie for my regular interview slot ‘This Much I Know About Rubbish’. This woman knows absolutely everything there is about swerving the skip.

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4. Tidy Japanese football fans

This BBC News story blew my mind. If we could all just be a bit more Japanese “my flytip” would be a dark invention in a dystopian novel rather than the view out of our bedroom window.

5. A good death

Dr Ben Gooch shares absorbing insights into his life as a family physician. This one reminded me of the piece I wrote about the horror of house clearances.

❤️ Join me on Notes for more of all this! ❤️

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Until my granny died in 2012 I had never thought about what an emotional, physical and logistical undertaking it is to clear out a late loved-one’s home.

She lived until 101, determined to remain in her Cornish clifftop house, a strange converted chapel with imposing unplastered stone walls, dark wood panelling and an extraordinary number of cupboards and drawers, most stuffed with miscellania undisturbed since the previous century.

When my granny could no longer tackle the steep stairs she abandoned her attic painting studio, a room I’d slept in on holidays as a kid, and it became “Fifi’s bedroom”: against a backdrop of half-finished canvases, sketchbooks and dried up Windsor & Newton paint tubes, every soft surface was matted with tortoiseshell cat hairs or crusted with feline bodily fluids. This and other things – the ornate chaise-longue with claw-shredded velvet; a lumpen dining table with chairs more suited to a castle; a solid white-painted bedroom suite the unfashionable side of midcentury – all came more sharply into focus the frailer she grew and I began to consider that someone was eventually going to have to deal with all this stuff. And that that someone would be me.

She departed one wintry night in a haze of morphine and terrible rasping breaths, her tiny hand in mine, and her physical presence was replaced by the emotionally charged contents of her house.

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My dad heroically got most of it into a van, which brought it to London, where I took the baton.

Under brutal lighting in the reception of Access Storage Acre Lane, my husband negotiated a swift upgrade as the size of the lock-up I’d booked was comically optimistic. He enjoys the geometry of packing and painstakingly squeezed in every last piece.

We pulled down a metal roller shutter over what looked like the cross-section of a landfill site. Yet it contained the cut-glass tumblers into which I’d obediently poured her a strong brandy and ginger hundreds of times; an ostentatious Victorian walnut and peach velvet nursing chair on which she’d painted me as a toddler; her 1950s fur coats, long-unwearable - even for a woman as defiant as my granny - and yet the cause of a tragic falling out I’d been sucked into into with her lovely neighbours, whom she’d unforgiveably and bizarrely accused of theft while in the grip of a UTI.

What the fuck was I going to do with all this stuff, so much of it with dubious appeal, that I didn’t want but couldn’t bear to see going to waste? Each thing would need to find the right home in order to have the best chance of staying in circulation. There was no one-size-fits-all approach: I was looking at multiple charity shops with different niches, eBay, auction, specialist buyers and of course family and friends. The logistics were lengthy. It took more than two years, and my dogged refusal to fill up bin bags or take anything reusable to the tip, along with sentimentality – and some truly lovely items in the mix – meant much ended up in our already full house.

All this came vividly back to me when I had the chance to shadow a unique house clearance operation. Javon Miller of Della Environmental Services, who you may recall from an earlier interview here, and his colleague, Danielle Hattrill of sustainable cleaning company Hattrill and Co. provide a ‘clean and clear’ service that specialises in rehoming or reusing as much as possible and doing it all thoughtfully and sensitively in collaboration with families. Had I found a service like this in 2012 we’d have swerved a lot of Access Storage invoices.

The location is the suburban south of the capital; a 1930s semi on a wide, curved road edged with hydrangea bushes, clipped hedges and pebble-dashed fronts.

Miller’s caged truck is parked outside number 15, a four-bedroom semi with a susbstantial outbuilding and garage, all of which had sat uninhabited and full of stuff in a long probate stalemate after its elderly owner had died suddenly. Finally, paperwork complete, Miller and Hattrill and their teams are in.

“We’re compassionate,” Hattrill tells me in the conservatory, where a tea-towel hangs poignantly on a clothes airer. “We’ve been through people passing and know that just having to sort out stuff can be enough, let alone having to distribute it.

“That’s how the clearance side of things came about; we’d come across so many people in this difficult situation and so much was going to waste.

“People have often hoarded stuff, too, and for families it can be too much.” She beams: “Whereas it’s something we absolutely love!”

Before a job like this, there’s a lot of background work. Between them, she and Miller will have already been in to assess the contents and photograph everything they think they can give away. Much of it will be advertised on their Facebook group, Too Good 4 The Tip, or passed to the Lewisham Donation Hub, a multi-bank set up to help those facing hardship during the pandemic. Hattrill also has a contact who runs a shop nearby called Preloved Stuff and passes lots to her, too (links below).

Through Facebook they’ve connected with a woman whose aunt is moving into an empty flat and who has earmarked a large portion of the furniture and electricals (these are PAT-tested when donated to charities).

Some items are harder to pass on. “That tree for example,” she says, gesturing to a large plant in the conservatory. “It’s been here dormant for God knows how long. It’s got a bit crusty. Most people would throw that out but you can tell it wants to live. I see value in everything. I’ll take that one home with me.”

Miller and Hattrill have committed to clear the house in just a day and a half. As she talks, Hattrill is darting around the room picking up, examining and moving items into various piles and bags. She rifles through a shelf of gardening products. “They’re all off and can’t be used unfortunately.”

A bucket of cleaning stuff won’t go to waste though. “We’re eco-friendly so don’t use them ourselves but we’ll test them out and, if they’re OK, pass them on – to the commercials or charities we work with, or even just distribute them among our cleaners to take home.” Even almost-empty bottles aren’t wasted as Hattrill washes and refills them with her home-made cleaning products for use by the business.

Vacuums and steam mops will also often find their way to the Hattrill and Co store cupboard or to people she knows.

“It’s basically ‘if you can use it, please do’. It’s all gonna have to go.”

There’s no wholesale solution is there? “Not unless we had a big old warehouse that we could store everything in. We’d do kind of an open house, take-what-you-like, kind of thing. We’d love that. But space don’t come cheap.”

But this shouldn’t just be a dream. Government and local authorities should routinely be funding sites like the imagined warehouse – perhaps diverting the vast sums currently being spent on clearing up flytips and working with communities to get people donating instead of dumping and building well-functioning and accessible circularity.

As I depart, mattresses are being heaved down the stairs and there’s a discussion going on about whether a throw is animal skin and if so, then what. Talking of which, if you’re wondering what happened to my gran’s furs, which I’d resisted examining and struggled to rehome, first at several charity shops, next at a vintage dress agency, last at an auction house, it turned out they’d been savaged by moths and had to be tipped. Despite my circular determination I can’t pretend that, in this instance, I wasn’t relieved.

Have you had to clear a loved-one’s home? Share the experience and any useful insights in the Comments below.

Resources: 
Della Environmental Solutions
Hattrill and Co. 
Preloved Stuff shop
Too Good 4 the Tip Facebook group
Lewisham Donation Hub, the multi bank set up during the pandemic to help local households facing financial hardship
Community Repaint is a charity that accepts donations of old paint for reuse

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“It’s not just vapes. It’s things like the kids’ trainers with the flashing lights. And how many parents have chucked their kids’ old trainers in the bin?”

As some of you may know, I walked out of my house a couple of weeks ago and into a lot of shouting, thick smoke and an unquashable fire burning in the back of a rubbish truck, right next to ‘our flytip’.

“At first my colleagues got nervous and told me there was a fire behind the truck,” says the truck’s driver, Francisco Amoroso, who I spoke to later that week. “I got out to check and saw the fire was starting to spread. I didn’t have time to get to the dump and so I ejected the garbage onto the ground and then tried to put it out but it was impossible. We had to wait about 20 minutes for the fire fighters.”

During those long twenty minutes, the crew emptied multiple fire extinguishers to no avail and a lone police officer did her best to manage a rapidly escalating situation while waiting for back-up.

Everyone present will also have breathed in a heady blend of toxic carbons monoxide and dioxide, sulphur dioxide-hydrogen cyanide, and hydrogens chloride and fluoride according to fire prevention expert, Jon Hughes, whose company, UK Fire Training, specialises in waste-related fires.

Generally, I’m not the kind of person to stop at the scene of some drama and whip out my phone to video it, but I knew what I was watching was important, even though I wasn’t immediately sure why.

I wrote about it all and posted the video on Instagram, where it’s now had 5.5m views and counting. Mind-bending.

I’m delighted that Lambeth Council, in whose borough the fire occurred, requested to use the film to use for public safety messaging and that BBC News, the World Service and LBC all ran stories with warnings about what can happen if you throw the wrong stuff away with your household waste. Which was exactly my aim in posting it in the first place. So, hurrah!

With thanks to and help from the already-mentioned refuse truck driver, Francisco Amoroso and fire prevention expert, Jon Hughes, as well as Lambeth Council’s waste team, here are responses to some of the most-asked questions about the video.

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What caused the fire?

A lithium-ion battery. Source unknown.

“Lithium-ion batteries are in anything chargeable. Vapes is the big one, because they’re just so commonly discarded,” explains Jon Hughes. More precisely, according to the Recycle Your Electricals campaign, an eye-widening 13 vapes every second are thrown away in the UK. This fire could have started with a vape, but it could also have been something with a larger battery. “You also have phones, laptops, X-boxes, Playstations, power tools, scooters, obviously electric vehicles, but it’s things like the kids’ trainers with the flashing lights that you might not have thought of. And how many parents have chucked their kids’ old trainers in the bin?”

The reason lithium-ion batteries need to be disposed of separately is because rubbish trucks have crushers and if you dent or pierce one of these babies, there’s a good chance it’ll burst into flames. If it doesn’t go up in the truck, it’ll get plenty of chances at the tip, where all sorts of other crushing, baling and sorting machinery will have a go. Often in a confined space with people working close by.

How was the truck after the fire?

A spokesperson for Lambeth Council’s waste team said the back of this truck was very badly burnt and that “it is currently being assessed by the insurance company.”

And what’s the financial damage? “The value of an RCV [refuse collection vehicle] ranges from £220k to £450k, depending on whether it is electric or not,” the spokesperson added.

It was that bloody Lime e-Bike wasn’t it?

This idea provoked a lively and vitriolic string of comments about the evils of Lime Bikes and also the assumed stupidity of the refuse collectors for throwing a bicycle into the back of the truck.

I have seen some outrageous things going in the back of dump trucks – watching a decent corner sofa recently get chewed up by one recently was extremely perplexing – but not, to date, a bicycle.

So to clarify: did the bike cause the fire? No! Did the refuse collectors mistake it for rubbish and throw it into the truck, flammable battery and all? Oh, come ON. (FYI, the Lime bike just happened to be parked on the pavement and got knocked over in the commotion.)

If you’re interested, you can read about the problems around bicycle over-consumption in my interview with sustainably-minded waste collector, Javon Miller.

‘Our local fly-tip’ – what?

A few people thought this description was fanciful. Sadly not.

What’s all that rubbish on the ground?

Actually that’s not our flytip. Well, not exclusively. The first thing the team did was empty the contents of their truck’s hopper onto the road to reduce the amount of flammable material inside an ultimately flammable vehicle. Some of those contents had just been collected from the flytip, though.

The hopper is the part of the truck where refuse is dumped and crushed, before it’s pushed deeper into the vehicle in a compacted form. This is how the bike got knocked over and mixed up with the rubbish.

The truck’s driver, Francisco Amoroso, who I spoke to in the wake of the fire, told me he’d experienced “four or five” similar fires in the past year just on his own round, one of which he’s shared on TikTok. “Everything depends on how calm you are, your training, and where [you choose] to dispose of the garbage in a way that causes the least possible harm to people. On two occasions I managed to [get it] to a nearby landfill.”

Jon Hughes, whose clients include Veolia and other waste and recycling businesses, explains that the Fire Service will often escort a burning truck away from residential and built-up areas, possibly to a waste site if one is nearby, to tip out its load. “An issue some clients have found though is that, by the time they get there, the fire has burnt through the truck’s hydraulics and it’s unable to tip, which means you’ve pretty much lost the lorry.”

Is ULEZ to blame?

Several commenters were concerned the rubbish collectors had unwittingly thrown a giant battery, possibly from the car of Sadiq Khan – architect of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone – into their truck. This, you can rest assured, is not the case.

I photograph a LOT of urban fly tips and have yet to see a car battery in one. And they are hard to miss. (Interesting and pleasing side fact on this topic, incidentally, gleaned from the National Grid’s blog: retired EV batteries are starting to be reused to store solar-generated energy – outside Japanese convenience stores, at sports stadiums and in our homes.)

This video, above, isn’t the one I posted. It’s taken a few minutes later as the police officer tries to pull everyone away from the truck, in case it explodes.

Are there many fires like this?

The truck’s driver Francisco Amoroso told me he’d experienced “four or five” in the past year on his round alone. A colleague of the guys from this truck, who was working in the next street and came to help, also told me there had been a similar fire just four days earlier.

“The last official figures, from 2023, were that there were more than 1200 fires in a year in the UK waste sector, 300 attended by the fire service. My guess is there are a lot more that aren’t being recorded,” Jon Hughes says.

Lambeth Council’s spokesperson adds: “It is difficult to say how frequently they are happening. But it is a growing problem for both the vehicles and the recycling processing plant.”

Why don’t they carry fire extinguishers on the trucks?

They do. As you can see in the video below (which I didn’t post on Instagram), the guys get the truck’s extinguishers out immediately. These run out and are ineffective and they then ask the police officer on the scene for another.

Jon Hughes explains there’s no such thing as a British Safety Standards-approved extinguisher that can put out a lithium-ion fire. Even water is no good and you can check out all sorts of fun videos online of lithium fires being submerged in buckets of water and exploding or intensifying. You can use a specialist recycled glass powder extinguisher to smother this kind of fire, equally a bucket of sand may be effective.

What else is it a terrible idea to put in your bin?

“Aerosols have been known to cause fires at the recycling processing plant, so we ask residents not to put these in their rubbish bins,” Lambeth Council’s spokesperson told me.

Jon concurs: “De-icer canisters, barbecue gas canisters and any other compressed gas canisters” can also be dangerous. He shows me a video of a canister exploding into in flames at an ‘MRF’ (Materials Recovery Facility) and an operative moving out of the way just in time. “That could have been a serious, serious injury,” he says. “People shouldn’t go to work and not come home because someone can’t be arsed to get rid of a canister in the right way.”

“One of the biggest challenges at the moment is contaminated recycling,” the Lambeth waste department say. “When people put things in their recycling bins that can’t be recycled it can result in the whole load being rejected. Contaminated recycling costs the council hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.”

What ARE you meant to do with lithium-ion-powered things you want to get rid of?

According to Lambeth Council: “All batteries, including lithium batteries, can be returned to any retailer that sells batteries. They have a legal obligation to make sure they’re recycled.” Small electrical items can be dropped at a Curries, while scooter and bike batteries can be dropped at selected branches of Halfords, Evans Cycles and Decathlon.

Resources 
Recycle Your Electricals – fantastically helpful on where to recycle vapes (and many other electronic devices!) 
National Grid story on recycled EV batteries 

Which items are you stumped by when it comes to responsible disposal?

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Do restack or share this on social media, along with a link to this piece, or my Instagram handle: @thisis.rubbish THANK YOU!

“Get out of the cab – it could all go up”.

Caught this frightening scene on my way to the office this morning.

As I walked out, I could hear panicked shouting and see a massive plume of black smoke over the building containing communal bins and adjacent to our local flytip (photograhed over a seven-year period here).

Rounding the corner, above, I saw the cause was the rubbish truck, doing its Monday morning rounds, engulfed in flames and spewing out toxic fumes. As you can see in the top video, taken a minute or so later, the situation got quickly got worse, putting the lives of the Serco waste collectors at risk, as well as nearby homes.

For around 20 minutes, the guys who work on the truck were armed with only small fire extinguishers to try to tackle the blaze. Police then arrived: “Guys, I think you need to step away now,” you can hear one officer saying in the video below. Then, more urgently, “Get out of the cab!” when the driver didn’t comply because he was still trying to quash the fire by moving the back of the truck up and down to tip out the burning rubbish. “It could all go up”.

The Police then started knocking on doors of the surrounding houses, some of which had opened their windows, letting in the thick fumes.

The guys on the truck, who work for Serco, told me they believed a discarded lithium battery – found in ebikes, vapes, mobile phones for example – was the most likely cause for the explosion. They said a similar fire had started in another truck only last Friday.

“Why didn’t they just remove it before throwing it away?” one asked in exasperation of the suspected battery, as the fire brigade finally arrived and they moved back from the scene.

Another Serco worker, who was doing his round on a nearby street, told me it could also have been a gas canister, as they find a lot of these thrown out with people’s rubbish. I discovered these Mr Whip nitrous oxide canisters chucked out on a patch of grass up the road a few weeks ago, for example; this stuff is officially for creating whipped cream, but also, of course, it gets you high. I’ve seen others in the past few weeks dumped on the street, too. According to Litech, a company that provides tech to detect hazardous items that have entered the waste stream, while nitrous oxide canisters are not in themselves flammable, they can explode with heat and then cause a small fire to grow rapidly.

This fairly unhelpful piece of advice and generic link is what appears on the Government website announcing the 2023 law change about the unlawful possession of nitrous oxide.

It’s legit if you’re using it in a catering environment – as this Mr Whip might have been – but no one is making it simple to dispose of. On a bit more investigation, for London, there’s a service collecting household hazardous waste. It does not collect canisters like these. Nor commercial waste. Is it any wonder it gets dumped?

But it was probably a lithium battery that started the fire in the first place, the guy from Serco I spoke to said. “We have to check every bit of rubbish that goes into the truck. They were clearing the fly tip. People throw out anything, they don’t care. They don’t put their rubbish in the right bins.” He added that the big metal communal bins were the worst and that they’d once found someone sleeping in one, and that people had dumped dead bodies in them. “And once something goes into the truck,” he says, “It’s gone.”

I write about flytipping in my monthly ‘Dump of the Month’ column with a lightness that I hope engages chat and thought around the topic - most of the people I talk to have felt overwhelmed enough by stuff to want to chuck it all out on the street, and so I relate. But I also aim to educate; giving people advice on how to dispose of their waste in other ways. This, however, is the very dark side of flytipping: these workers’ lives were at risk; all of us living nearby were at risk from a massive truck exploding in the street; we all inhaled a fuckload of toxic smoke (the firebrigade put on heavy duty masks before they went anywhere near it). Will this event help to change things, at least in our area? I’ll keep you posted.

Have you experienced a rubbish-related fire? Tell me your thoughts and experiences below. And please do restack or share this on social media, along with a link to this piece, or my Instagram handle: @thisis.rubbish THANK YOU!

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I’m fascinated by the idea of clay as reclaimed waste. Until I read a piece, a couple of years ago, about the potential for the clay dredged up in preparation for the construction of HS2 to be salvaged, mixed with cement and used to build station platforms, drastically reducing the amount of carbon produced by the project, I’d never considered that raw clay might be treated as rubbish. Yet much of the stuff that gets dug up when a building’s foundations go down is often skipped and discarded.

I’d also never thought of clay’s potential beyond pots and sculpture until a piece I was writing led me to interview Jez at Kind Construction in Lewes, East Sussex, which specialised in natural building materials. The company is no more but has morphed into one called Unearthed, which makes and sells clay (and lime) plasters. So if you’re planning building work that involves digging down, you may find there’s a market for or alternative destination than the tip for what gets dug up. Or you could even have it made into a bespoke plaster for your interior. (Give the idea a google – skipping past the oft-wrong AI overview – and get some tips, or tap up Unearthed for their expertise.)

At this year’s London Design Festival (LDF), much of which continues this weekend, artists and designers are using reclaimed and found clay in their work. And there’s still time to catch some of the clay action at LDF25, details below.

1. No One Has Taught Me This Blackdot, 9 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX

These beautiful and tactile jars and pots, created by ceramicist and fresh UAL graduate (Chelsea College of Arts), Neve Beill, are the result of mudlarking along the Thames and coastal walks in her native Isle of Wight.

Beill makes use of found materials, consciously replacing the conventional commercial materials typically used in the ceramics industry so as to reduce waste. Her designs, inspired by Roman vessels, fragments of which are often washed up in both her materials-sourcing locations, have been made from a range of waste materials, including clay from construction sites, broken pieces of glass and ash. The variety of finishes echoes the differing tactile qualities she observed while scavenging. @neve.beill.ceramics

2. Reframing Waste Bloobloom, 30 James Street London, WC2E 8PA

“Each year, the UK produces an estimated 29 million tonnes of excavation waste, yet only half is recovered for secondary use,” say Golden Earth Studio. Highlighting some possible uses for what’s often treated as rubbish, Reframing Waste, an event curated by Golden Earth, exhibits fine art and functional designs created using excavated clay. Find out more.

3. Clay|Culture|Carbon MoCo Home, 215-217 Mare Street, London E8 3QE

This hopeful show explorates the ways in which an age-old building material could and should be part of a sustainable future. Foraged raw clay and alternatives to carbon-intensive fired-clay brick production feature in an exploration of low-carbon and circular clay brick innovation, climate-conscious construction and the potential of clay within this context. Find out more.

4. Rescued Clay workshops, Minerva Works, 1-2 Minerva Road, London NW10 6HJ

Sadly I just missed this one, part of the Park Royal Design District (partly because I was busy getting a tour of my favourite south London tip, the Southwark Integrated Waste Facility – FASCINATING!).

The LDF event was a weekend of workshops making things using salvaged clay. My kids would have LOVED it. But it’s included because I’m happy to have discovered northwest London pottery studio, Rescued Clay, which works to reduce waste by reclaiming clay from construction sites and researching its potential for reuse and transformation into new objects. Along with that, it offers a variety of rescued clay pottery classes as well as education for existing ceramicists. @rescuedclay

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Next week, it’s back to the usual formats, kicking off with a great ‘This much I know about rubbish’ interview. If you’re a regular reader, tell me below what your favourite types of stories here are – and what would you like to see more of?