That Bloody Sofa!

Someone took a sofa for a walk in Totnes last week.

Unfortunately, it clearly got too heavy for their tired limbs, so they left it on the road. Leaving Sima Cutting and her neighbours with the job of getting rid of it.

But how?

• Option One: Pay £25 for Devon County Council to take it away.
• Option Two: Tell South Hams and hope they will take it away.
• Option Three: Ask a friend with a van to take it to a tip.
• Option Four : Ignore it and hope someone else will want it…..

Sima said: “I didn’t want to pay £25 to remove someone else’s sofa so I reported it to South Hams.” Taking it to the tip isn’t straightforward as Totnes recycling centre no longer accepts soft furniture, leaving only Ivybridge in the district. This is because of new regulations covering fire retardant chemicals used in furniture manufacture. Not only can’t many tips now take such furniture, it has to be transported in a separate skip lorry to the incinerator.

There is another problem.
South Hams has a responsibility to collect fly tipped stuff from public land. They have a reporting section of their website where you can pinpoint on the map where the piles of old fridges and
manky sinks are. There is even a national flytipping hotline run by the Environment Agency – 0800 807 060.

But Sima’s house is up a private road…and the sofa was left at the bottom. “So I thought shall I dump it on the road then!” No, of course she didn’t. “A neighbour offered to take it to the tip but he doesn’t have time to go to Ivybridge.” Even if she could have used her own van – from her now dormant Kitchen Table catering company – she’d be classed as a business and would either be refused or made to pay. “I went to the tip with some cushions once and they wouldn’t let me dump them.”

Fly tipping costs millions to clear away – paid for either by the landowner or the district council. Being responsible and paying a licensed waste carrier is expensive . One local firm the Pulse contacted charges £250 a tonne for a mixed load. Six days after Sima contacted South Hams the sofa was still there. “I used to live in Melbourne where they had a “rubbish day” and people put things on the street and others could take it away. Anything left that night was cleared up by the council. They could do something like that here.”

The saga of the saggy sofa has one silver lining…. It wasn’t a three piece suite. That would have cost £75 to collect as each item is £25.

Sadly at time of publishing – a week later, that bloody sofa remains in situ…

The Pulse asks:
Perhaps if recycling centres were free to all ,fly tipping wouldn’t be such a problem? Or perhaps if we weren’t so disgusting and took our rubbish home the countryside would be cleaner?
The other day I saw a dirty duvet in Morrison’s car park. I mean, REALLY?

What’s the answer? Let us know….Comment Below.