It took eight people to clear out the cluttered home (Picture: Kennedy News and Media)
An eight-person team waded through 10 tonnes of knee-high rubbish that a hoarder in Lancashire had accumulated over a decade.
The refuge disposal team the Rubbish Collectors captured the moment workers found endless piles of beer cans and urine bottles in the two-bed house.
The house, which a service user inherited from a distant relative, was set to be sold but would have had little chance of this due to the ceiling-high waste and filthy walls and facilities.
Rubbish Collectors’ operations manager Richard Walsh, 31, said it took three days to throw out all the trash that engulfed the floors and even an armchair and mattress.
‘When we got up to the second floor, each bedroom was full to chest height with rubbish – beer bottles, beer cans, food, all sorts,’ he told the MailOnline.
‘The entire floor, even the stairs, was full of rubbish. Then there was a third floor where the loft space was and that was absolutely floor to ceiling.
Rubbish completely consumed one of the bedrooms (Picture: Kennedy News and Media)
‘You had to duck down to get in the doorways because it was piled up so high. A lot of the bedrooms you couldn’t even get in them.
‘I believe it was one man that lived there that unfortunately was an alcoholic and over the years he had been accumulating waste and mess – all the beer cans and bottles.
‘A lot of the bottles had been filled up with urine as well so that was the big issue on the job that made it the hardest to deal with – that was the most shocking part.’
Walsh said he suspects the rubbish had been piling up for more than a decade, remarking that the ‘smell was quite bad’.
‘You had to duck down to get in the doorways because it was piled up so high. A lot of the bedrooms you couldn’t even get in them,’ Walsh added.
‘I believe it was one man that lived there that unfortunately was an alcoholic and over the years he had been accumulating waste and mess – all the beer cans and bottles.
There was thought to be more than a decades-worth of rubbish in the house (Picture: Kennedy News and Media)
‘A lot of the bottles had been filled up with urine as well so that was the big issue on the job that made it the hardest to deal with – that was the most shocking part,’ he added.
‘As we were moving it some of the bottles of urine started breaking and the smell was quite bad.
‘We probably moved between eight and ten tonnes of waste out of a two-bedroom terraced house, which is pretty substantial.’
All the cans and bottles were given to a local recycling centre, with a video uploaded to Facebook on November 7 showing the home completely empty after the clear-out.
Hoarding, where people struggle to discard things, is a diagnosed mental health condition and affects between 2.5% to 6% of Brits, according to Hoarding Disorders UK.
The NHS says that people who have hoarding tendencies ‘frequently do not see it as a problem’ as the condition worsens behind closed doors.
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Although some have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, not all hoarders do. Depression, certain psychotic disorders and living alone are among the reasons why people may hoard.
When people try to discard something, this can bring up a lot of intense emotions. Their reasons for keeping objects might not be the most obvious to others, but they feel deeply about it just the same.
‘It’s easy to go in there and think: “How can someone live like this?” but people do so you have to be compassionate and non-judgemental,’ Walsh added.
‘Our teams are very good at that. We’re not there to judge anyone, we’re just there to do a job for them.
‘Whether they’re clearing it for themselves or a family member it’s obviously a sensitive situation so that’s how we deal with it.’
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‘As we were moving it some of the bottles of urine started breaking and the smell was quite bad.’
