People often assume an old piano just goes to the tip. It doesn’t have to. A piano is mostly cast iron, timber and steel — all recyclable if someone is prepared to take it apart properly. That’s exactly what we do.
Once a piano reaches us, we dismantle it and separate the materials so each goes to the right recycling stream:
Our team carries the piano out — from any floor — and loads it safely, protecting your home on the way.
We check whether the instrument could be re-homed or restored. If it’s genuinely beyond saving, it goes for recycling.
The frame, timber, strings and fittings are taken apart and sorted into the correct materials.
Metals and timber go to recycling; only what truly can’t be reused is disposed of. All under our waste carrier licence CBDU133377.
An upright piano weighs between 200 and 300kg, and a grand a good deal more. The single heaviest component is the cast-iron frame, which can make up a large share of that weight on its own. Sent to landfill, all of it simply becomes buried waste. Taken apart properly, most of it — the iron, the steel and the timber — is straightforward, valuable recycling material.
That is really the whole reason a piano is worth stripping down. It isn’t a delicate job of picking out a few small recyclable bits; it’s a heavy, material-rich object that is mostly metal and wood. Once the strings are released and the frame is separated from the casing, each stream goes where it should: the frame and steel to metal recycling, and the timber casing and soundboard to wood recycling or reuse.
We’re honest about the parts that can’t be recovered. Old felts, some cloth and a handful of mixed fittings have no clean recycling route, so those are sorted and disposed of responsibly rather than pretended away. But the great majority of a piano, by weight, stays out of the ground — which is the point.
Everything we collect is carried and processed under our registered waste carrier licence (CBDU133377). That means the piano is moved, stripped and passed to the right recycling facilities legally and traceably — not fly-tipped or quietly dumped. When you pay a specialist to take a piano away, that guarantee is a large part of what you’re paying for.
Chat with us today and let’s get you a price worked out. No forms to fill in, just a friendly chat or a call.
