Guesstimating Green Waste

Thank you, it is good that you could join me for this guide to guesstimating the gross and net volume of green waste you are looking to get rid of after your gardening extravaGanza.  I just realised recently that often when trying work out how much waste you have and what size of skip bin you will need to accommodate.  It it is a case of working out the volume of a solid mass and then calculating what the volume will be after it has been expended.  

Now with Green waste it is actually the other way round. It is first easiest to work out what the gross volume is of the green waste and then you need to make allowances to work out how much volume it will take up when it is placed in a skip bin and crushed down into the bin.  Of course that are going to be many variables in term of the "compression" ratio of green waste but we will try and explain some of them to make the process as easy as possible to understand.


Now the first thing to note in this tour of green waste estimating is that for different types of green waste there will be things to relating to the type of green waste that need to be considered.  The crush-ability of the green organic materials. Different green wastes have different properties. Bushy plants will general not crush down or be as compressible as much as long lanky plants like bamboo. The nature of the leaves on the green plants will also effect how compressible the material is.