Paint disposal

[Nurseandy]

Eventually moved house after three postponements, working on making it more resilient now, biggest issue is water - on a private water supply but a borehole pump is used so reliant on electricity. Anyhow sorted in short term with 25l water containers.

Getting to the point though - the previous owners have lefts loads & loads of half used paint tins. For disposal our local council says to mix with cat litter then can go in general rubbish. There's a biomass boiler here (now defunct) but also several bags of wood pellets for it. Has anyone any experience of using these instead of cat litter? They're a bit damp so can't burn them.
I could of course try it on a small tin but thought I'd save a bit of mess by asking first

[jennyjj01]

Getting to the point though - the previous owners have lefts loads & loads of half used paint tins. For disposal our local council says to mix with cat litter then can go in general rubbish. ...

I could of course try it on a small tin but thought I'd save a bit of mess by asking first

Oil paint? Emulsion? Tins? Plastic tubs? A hodge-podge of nasty hazardous waste.
Can you give any of it away on Facebook or Gumtree?

Really think long and hard before putting it in general rubbish no matter what the council say. Even empty tins or tubs could still be hazardous waste.

Try here first...
https://www.recyclenow.com/recycle-an-item/paint
or
https://www.paintcare.org.uk/recycle-the-rest/

You can mix it with sand or sawdust, too. But you need to have it set solid before they SHOULD accept it. My local council does not make that at all obvious so we could fall foul of the law. In fact the whole area of hazardous waste disposal is loaded with myths and bad advice.
" Traditional advice such as absorbing the material with sand is terrible for the environment as it leaches into the watercourses at landfill sites."

A real PITA if you have any quantity.

Check if your local waste recycling centre has an area where you can simply deposit the paint containers for them to deal with. You might get lucky. Consider paying a hazardous waste disposal company.

https://www.allwastematters.co.uk/waste-paint-disposal/
"Some recycling centres may still take paint for disposal. This would only apply for domestic waste paint and in most cases only non-hazardous liquids such as emulsion. "

https://www.recyclezone.org.uk/how-to-dispose-of-paint/
https://tw-services.co.uk/blog/how-to-dispose-of-paint

[joking]
If you are on a property with a bore hole or well, you can just pour or lob your paint into that.
[/joking]

Good luck.

[British Red]

- on a private water supply but a borehole pump is used so reliant on electricity. Anyhow sorted in short term with 25l water containers.

Depending on the size of the casing pipe and depth of the bore hole, it's often possible to slip a hand pump pipe down the side of the pipe for the pump to provide backup. Failing that if you switch the feed from a hard wired spur to an outdoor plug and socket a basic generator or even batter & inverter will take care of that. Private water is a huge plus

[GillyBee]

I think the point of the cat litter is to get the paint to dry out so the wood pellets may help if they are not too damp. Waste handlers & dumps will not take liquid paint.
Dry sand will also work, You could offer it on Freecycle or you may have some community schemes that could use part cans of paint if any is still usable.
Or you could paint the insides of your outbuildings (if you have any) just to use it up and dry the cans out.

You mentioned a private water supply. It is great to be off grid but may need a change in attitude to water. Do you know how it behaves in drought?
I spent 3 months in a youth centre many years ago during a period of drought and their borehole was struggling. we all learned to pour a cup of water before brusing our teeth and one lad was left smothered in soap with no water to rise off. The water tank would full slowly overnight but coud not cope with the daily onslaught of the residents.
Meanwhile the cook told me that at home their well was so close to dry that all the males in the family had been banned from the bathroom and told to use the compost heap.

[Nurseandy]

Cheers all, free cycle/ fb Market Place are good ideas.

Private water supply is shared with two other properties, one the farmer whose land it is on and one other house. It is pumped out of the borehole and to a holding tanking further up the hill and gravity fed to us so some reserve in the event of power outage.

Thanks for concern with private water supply but (without wanting to come across as a dick) our last two properties over the last 25 years have been on private supplies plus prior to retraining as a nurse I was contracted to scottish water installing potable water supplies for remote communities for the best part of 10 years.

I will now of course get ill from crytosporidum and the borehole run dry

[jennyjj01]

I will now of course get ill from crytosporidum and the borehole run dry

Or some bu66er Will pour paint in it

[Nurseandy]

[Ara]

My favourite method of paint disposal is to use it so, although all our walls are white, the cupboard interiors are green/blue/yellow/funny light brown colour etc etc. Some of our furniture suffered from left-over paint syndrome too. I hit upon a problem at our sons house recently when I discovered that a nearly full tub of emulsion paint had gone off and was unusable. How on earth do I get rid of that?

[jansman]

I cleared my workshop a couple of years ago. Council wouldn’t take it. So when the council roadsweeper/ bin man came round, I had a word. For a tenner, he took it , and would say he found it dumped in a ditch.

[mbbaltic]

We can take paint tins to our local tip but anything else we have to order a hazardous waste collection. The council will do one collection for free so we need to go through the cellar and the shed and collect all the old half empty nasties together. One thing I am having trouble getting rid of is small out of date fire extinguishers. I’ve got one current one and keep the only just OOD one as back up but I’ve got two older ones which are probably fine but superfluous. I asked the local fire station community info service what I should do but never got a reply.