Muck away, tip run and skip exchange: the yard's own words for a movement

Muck away is the trade name for excavated material taken off a site and tipped elsewhere: topsoil, subsoil, clay, stone, broken hardcore and whatever else comes out of a dig. The word describes the job, moving the muck away, not the material, so two loads called muck away can be entirely different things on paper.

It is the language of the groundworker and the haulier. A builder rings the yard and asks for muck away on a footings dig. What arrives at the weighbridge is a grab lorry or a skip full of clay and stone, and what has to be written down is a waste movement between two parties, with a description of the waste, a code from the List of Waste, a weight and the receiving site.

An example

A house extension in Reading digs out footings on a Tuesday. The groundworker books two 8 yard skips of muck away. The first is clean subsoil and stone off virgin ground. The second is the same subsoil mixed with the old oil-stained concrete hardstanding that used to be the garage floor. Both loads arrive at your transfer station described on the phone as muck away. One is a straightforward non-hazardous soil and stones entry. The other may be soil contaminated by hazardous substances, which sits under a starred entry on the list and brings a consignment note with it, not an ordinary transfer note.

The yard word did not tell you which was which. The person handing the load over has to, and that answer belongs on the note.

Nobody in a yard is going to stop saying muck away, and nobody should. The problem is only that the word travels from the phone call to the gate to the duplicate book without ever being turned into a description the Environment Agency would recognise.

A note that says "muck away, 1 skip" tells an inspector nothing. It does not say whether the soil was contaminated, it does not carry a code, and it does not tie to a weighbridge ticket. Write the same load as excavated soil and stones from a footings dig, with the code, the tonnage off the plate, the carrier's registration and the destination, and the record stands up on its own two years later when somebody asks.

The practical fix on a busy gate is a short translation habit. When the driver says muck away, the person on the weighbridge asks two questions: where did it come from, and is there anything in it that was not in the ground. Those two answers pick the description and decide whether this is an ordinary transfer note or a consignment note.

• Tip run. A single trip to the tip and back. Each run is a waste movement in its own right, so one run is one note, even when the driver does five of them before lunch.
• Skip exchange. Collecting a full skip and leaving an empty one. The full skip leaving site is the movement that needs recording. The empty going on is just plant.
• Season ticket. One transfer note covering repeat collections of the same waste from the same place for up to a year, which is how most regular muck away contracts are handled without writing a fresh note every morning.
• Duty of care. The obligation on everyone in the chain to describe the waste properly, check who is taking it and keep the record. It is the reason the yard word alone is never enough.
• EWC code. The List of Waste code that turns a description into something the EA can count. Excavated soil has its own entries, and contaminated soil sits under a starred hazardous one.
• Consignment note. The record hazardous waste travels on instead of a transfer note. Contaminated muck away and asbestos in dig arisings both land here.
• Weighbridge ticket. The printed weight that should be the single source for the tonnage on the note, rather than an estimate written from memory at the end of the shift.