Ten things you can do yourself before move day, each with an honest note on how much work it is and how much difference it makes.
Most eco-friendly moving tips fail for the same reason: they arrive too late. By the week before completion you are packing at eleven at night and the greenest option is whatever is nearest. Almost everything that makes a real difference has to happen earlier, which is why this is written as a six-week plan rather than a list. Ten actions, each with an honest note on the effort involved and the difference it makes, in the order the calendar wants them.
These are all things you do, not things a remover does. We have put the effort and impact ratings on plainly, including the ones where the impact is small — you can then spend your energy where it counts rather than spreading it evenly across ten jobs that are not equally worth doing.
Effort: high. Impact: the highest on this list. Everything downstream is decided by how much you are moving. Volume sets the vehicle, the vehicle sets the fuel, and the carton count follows the volume. It is also the only item here where a weekend of work changes the number by tens of per cent rather than single figures.
Do it before the surveyor comes, not after. A survey done on a house you are about to halve produces a quote for a house you no longer have, and the lorry gets booked accordingly. Work room by room with four destinations in mind — keep, sell, give away, dispose — and be honest about the loft, which is where the argument really is. The downsizing guide has the room-by-room method if you want a structure to follow.
One test settles most items faster than any other: have I used this in the last twelve months, and would I buy it again today at full price? Two noes and it is not coming.
Effort: low. Impact: high, and almost nobody does it. Vehicle size is guessed from what the surveyor sees. Anything hidden — the contents of a locked garage, the pieces at a relative’s house, the shed you forgot to mention — is not in the calculation. Under-declare and the lorry runs out of room, which means a second run: the same route driven twice for one household.
So walk the surveyor round everything, including the loft hatch and the garden. Say if the piano is coming, or the safe, or the four-metre rug. Say if you might still be packing on the morning. It is a twenty-minute conversation that prevents the single most wasteful failure mode in removals, and it also prevents the argument on the day. Our page on what to ask a removals company works the same conversation from the other direction.
Effort: low. Impact: moderate, and it collapses to zero if you leave it. Charity furniture collections are booked weeks ahead, and they will refuse anything without a fire label, anything with a tear, and often anything upholstered they cannot resell quickly. Ring in week six and you get a slot. Ring in the last week and you will be loading a sofa into a car and driving it to the tip, which is the outcome this whole list exists to prevent.
Local Sussex charities including St Wilfrid’s Hospice, Demelza and the British Heart Foundation collect free for sellable furniture and larger household items. Ask what they will and will not take before the van is booked; a wasted collection is a wasted journey for them as well as you. Anything with real resale value is worth listing at the same time, because a listing takes minutes and the item then leaves under someone else’s power.
Effort: moderate. Impact: moderate. A used double-wall carton in good condition does the same job as a new one and has already paid its manufacturing cost. Start with your remover — ours sells second-hand cartons through the Lower Dicker packaging shop, all of which have done a move or two and have several left in them. Then local reuse groups, where somebody who completed last month is trying to clear a garage full.
Two cautions from experience. Take double-wall, not the single-wall boxes that arrive at supermarkets carrying tins; they fail on stairs and the failure usually involves crockery. And check they are dry, because a box stored on a garage floor over winter has lost most of its strength whatever it looks like. Buying half your cartons used and half new is a perfectly good outcome; the aim is not purity, it is fewer boxes made.
Effort: low. Impact: small in carbon, large in food waste and hassle. A freezer has to be emptied, defrosted and dried before it travels, and frozen food does not survive a move day sitting in a car boot. The households that end up scraping a full freezer into a bin bag are the ones that were still doing a normal weekly shop three days before completion.
Work backwards from move day. Four weeks out, stop restocking the freezer and start planning meals around what is in it. Two weeks out, do the same with the store cupboard. Anything unopened and in date that you will not get through goes to a food bank — most supermarkets have a collection point — rather than into the move or the bin. Open jars and half-used bottles are not worth moving; the carbon of transporting them exceeds their value comfortably.
Effort: low. Impact: small, but it is the category that goes wrong most often. Paint, solvents, weedkiller, white spirit, aerosols, barbecue gas, motor oil and old batteries are the things nobody thinks about until move week, and they are exactly the things a removal firm cannot legally load. Hazardous items are excluded from removals contracts and from the insurance, so they will be left standing in the garage when the lorry pulls away.
Deal with them early. Use up what can be used, offer usable paint to a neighbour or a community repaint scheme, and take the rest to the household waste site — every district in Sussex takes paint, oil, batteries and gas bottles, but they take them at specific bays and sometimes only on specific days. Check before you drive over with a car full. Doing this in week four rather than the night before is the difference between a planned trip and an abandoned pile.
Effort: high. Impact: moderate. Outbuildings are the last place anyone looks and the place that generates the most last-minute waste. Half-used compost, broken tools, three hosepipes, the lawnmower that has not started since 2023, plant pots by the hundred. It is bulky, it is dirty, it will not have been counted in the survey, and it is the classic cause of a lorry running out of room.
Two weeks out is the right time, because garden and tool items sell and rehome quickly at that notice while there is still a weekend spare. Working tools, pots and unopened compost go to neighbours, allotment groups or a local reuse group in a morning. Broken metal goes for scrap rather than into general waste. And decide early whether the mower and the barbecue are actually moving with you, because both need draining of fuel before they go on a lorry.
Effort: low. Impact: small but genuinely yours. The hidden mileage in a move is not the lorry, it is the car: three trips to the recycling centre, two to the charity shop, one for more boxes, one for tape, one for the thing you forgot. Six short cold-start journeys in a week is not a trivial amount of fuel and it is entirely avoidable with a list.
Batch it. One Saturday, one loop: charity drop, household waste site, materials collection, anything being handed to a neighbour. Order packing materials in a single delivery rather than topping up twice — each top-up is a van coming out for a handful of boxes. And check the recycling centre’s opening times and any booking system before you set off, because a wasted trip is the most annoying kind of emission there is.
Effort: very low. Impact: small in carbon, disproportionate in waste avoided. The most reliably wasteful hour of any move is the first evening in the new house, when the kettle is in an unmarked box and somebody drives to a supermarket and buys another one. Duplicate kettles, duplicate screwdrivers, duplicate loo roll, a takeaway because the pans are missing.
One clearly labelled carton, loaded last so it comes off first, prevents nearly all of it. Kettle, mugs, tea, a couple of plates and pans, a knife, loo roll, hand soap, a towel each, phone chargers, paracetamol, a screwdriver and a bin bag. Two more useful additions: the vacuum cleaner, and a labelled bag of the screws and fittings from anything the crew dismantled. Missing fittings are the usual reason a bed gets replaced rather than rebuilt.
Effort: low, if you do it immediately. Impact: moderate. This is the action with the shortest window on the whole list. Empty cartons that are flattened and kept dry will do several more moves; the same cartons left in a heap in the garden for a fortnight are recycling at best. Nothing about the box changed except where it spent two wet weeks.
So as each one empties, flatten it and stack it somewhere dry. Then ring your remover — we collect empty cartons free of charge within our normal delivery range and put the sound ones back into circulation. If that is not available, local move groups clear a stack of double-wall boxes in a day, especially bundled with the leftover paper. Keep a dozen back for the loft and for the things that never quite got unpacked. Our guide to eco-friendly packing materials covers what recycles and what does not, if some of it has to go that way.
The last action, once the reduction work is done, is optional: offset whatever genuinely remains. It is deliberately last, because it is the only item here that can be bought rather than done, and the honest sequence is to shrink the number first. Our page on offsetting a house move explains what a credible scheme looks like and what it costs.
Three popular suggestions did not make it. Renting plastic crates is fine for a fast, dense move but works badly for a household packing over six weeks, because the crates sit idle in a hallway and each hire is a delivery and a collection. Insisting on a green removals firm is worth doing, but it is not something you do — it belongs on the list of questions to ask, which is why it lives in our guide to what makes a removals company sustainable instead.
And going paperless comes up on every list of green moving tips. Quotes and contracts are almost all digital now anyway, and the carbon involved in a few sheets of paper is a rounding error next to a single lorry mile. It is a fine habit and it is not a moving tip.
One thing we have deliberately not included is choosing where to live. Distance is by far the biggest variable in a move’s footprint, but nobody picks a house on that basis and it would be slightly absurd to suggest it. What you can control is how much goes in the lorry, which is item one.
We are a family-run Sussex remover — the same name on the lorry as the name on the paperwork. Mark personally surveys the high-value and overseas moves; our crews are directly employed (not casual day labour) and trained at our own staff training centre, one of only a handful of UK removers with that facility on site.
Standard inclusions on every full removal: pad-wrap protection for every freestanding piece of furniture, removal-grade cartons, a written and itemised fixed-price quote with no surprises on the day, and the British Association of Removers' Advance Payment Guarantee protecting every deposit. The result, over the years and hundreds of moves, is a 4.9/5 review average across 120+ independent Google reviews.
Booking the survey takes ten minutes. Whether it's a one-bedroom flat across Eastbourne or a country house to overseas, the process is the same: in-home or video survey, written quote within 48 hours, deposit-protected booking, and a calm move day.
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Six weeks out: sort the house properly, give the surveyor an accurate inventory including the loft and the garage, and book the charity collections. Four weeks out: source second-hand cartons before buying new, start eating down the freezer and cupboards, and clear out the paint, oils, aerosols and batteries that no removal firm can legally carry.
Two weeks out: deal with the shed, the garage and the garden, and batch every drop-off and collection into a single run. One week out: pack the essentials carton and load it last. Move week: flatten and dry the empties within forty-eight hours, get them collected or rehomed, then offset whatever is genuinely left.
Two of these ten matter far more than the other eight, and both happen in week six. If the calendar collapses and you only manage two things, make them the sort-out and the honest inventory. For your specific move, the free survey takes ten minutes and we’ll come back within 48 hours with a fixed-price quote and a plan that fits your situation. Our customer reviews average 4.9 out of 5 across more than 120 independent ratings.
Six weeks. Charity collections book out weeks ahead, second-hand cartons take a little hunting, and freezers and store cupboards need a month of planned eating to empty. Anything left to the final week defaults to the fastest option available, which is almost never the least wasteful one.
Sorting the house properly before the survey. Volume decides vehicle size, vehicle size decides fuel, and the carton count follows the volume. A weekend of honest sorting shifts the number by tens of per cent; nothing else on the list comes close.
Paint, solvents, aerosols, fuel, gas bottles and old batteries are hazardous goods, excluded from removals contracts and from the insurance cover. They cannot go on the lorry whatever the crew think of it. Use them up or take them to the household waste site, where they go to specific bays rather than the general skip.
Kettle, mugs, tea, a few plates and pans, a knife, loo roll, soap, a towel each, phone chargers, paracetamol, a screwdriver, a bin bag, the vacuum cleaner, and a labelled bag holding the fittings from anything the crew dismantled. Load it last so it comes off first — it is what stops the first evening turning into a supermarket run for a second kettle.
Within about forty-eight hours. Flattened and kept dry, a double-wall carton will do several more moves and your remover will collect it. Left outside for a fortnight it is soft, damp and fit only for recycling. Nothing changed but where it sat.