What a forty actually holds

A 40 yard can will not carry 40 yards of rubble. It will carry about nine. The cap is on weight, and the number you need is tonnes per cubic yard.

People order by volume because volume is what you can see. The can is rated by weight, because weight is what the axle, the licence and the outlet all care about. Those two numbers only agree for one material, and it is not the one most people are ordering for.

The arithmetic, once

Our 40 yard roll-on is capped at 12 tonnes. Hardcore runs about 1.35 tonnes per cubic yard. Twelve divided by 1.35 is a little under nine — so a 40 yard can of hardcore hits its cap at about nine yards, which is a quarter full, and looks embarrassing on site.

Cardboard runs 0.09 tonnes per cubic yard. Forty yards of it weighs 3.6 tonnes and the can fills long before the cap does. That is the case the 40 exists for.

The full set of densities is on the sizes page, measured off our own tickets rather than copied out of a table.

So the rule is

Size the can on the heaviest stream going into it. Not the average, not the bulkiest — the heaviest. If a strip-out is mostly timber and board with one bathroom’s worth of tile and screed in it, the tile decides the can.

If that gives you a small can and a lot of trips, that is genuinely the answer, and it is still cheaper than an overweight collection we cannot legally move.

The two failures we see

Overloaded. Loaded above the rave, or over the cap. We cannot sheet a proud can and we will not move it. Somebody has to stand in it and take material off, and that is a chargeable hour nobody enjoys.

A 40 hired for rubble. It arrives, it takes a morning’s dig, it is at cap, and the site now has a mostly-empty 40 yard container in the way of everything for three days. Two 12 yard maxis would have been quicker and cheaper.

What we would rather you did

Ring the gate and describe the job. Sizing a can is thirty seconds of somebody else’s experience, and it is free.