Who we are
Edinburgh Clearance is a small family business based in Edinburgh. We started clearing local homes more than a decade ago and have grown steadily, by word of mouth and repeat business, into a team that handles thousands of clearances each year across Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife, the Scottish Borders, Stirling and Falkirk.
We are not a national franchise, not a brokerage, and not a sub-contracted operation. Every job is carried out by our own employed team, in our own vehicles, to our own standards. When you book Edinburgh Clearance, the people who arrive on the day are the people who work for the business — not strangers a despatcher has phoned that morning.
What we believe
House clearance, done badly, can be one of the worst experiences a family ever has with a trades business. Cowboys quote low, then add surprise charges. Items of sentimental or monetary value go missing. Items the family wanted kept get thrown out by mistake. Hazardous waste ends up dumped illegally — and the legal liability lands back on the customer. We have heard variations of all these stories from clients who came to us after bad experiences elsewhere, and we built our business around being the opposite of that.
Our quotes are fixed in writing before any work begins. Our team is briefed on every job to set aside anything that looks personal, sentimental or valuable. Our waste is tracked from collection to legal disposal, and every customer receives a SEPA-compliant waste transfer note. We carry £5 million of public liability insurance, plus employers' liability and goods-in-transit cover. None of this is sales talk — it is the minimum we think any clearance company should be doing.
Our team
Our front-line team are full-time employees, not casual labour or zero-hours staff. Most have been with us for years. They are trained in safe manual handling, in biohazard awareness for hoarder and post-mortem clearances, in the practical realities of working in Edinburgh tenements with narrow stairs and tight parking, and — perhaps most importantly — in the social skills of dealing with families during difficult times. We choose our team for temperament as much as for fitness, and we are unusually careful about who joins us.
Every team member is DBS-checked, carries photo identification on the job, and wears body-cam equipment that records the work. The footage is held securely for a short period and made available to customers on request — useful proof of what was and was not present at the start of a clearance, and a strong deterrent against any allegations going either way.
Our approach to waste
We are licensed by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) as commercial waste carriers. That registration is the bare legal minimum for anyone moving waste in Scotland, and the absence of it is the most common warning sign of an unlicensed operator. Our registration number is available on request, and waste transfer notes are issued for every job.
Beyond the legal minimum, we operate a recycling-first policy. Items in usable condition are routed first to local Edinburgh charities — Bethany Christian Trust, Cyrenians, Shelter Scotland, Salvation Army and others — who can either reuse the items directly or sell them through their charity shops. Items not suitable for reuse are sorted into recycling streams: metals to scrap recycling, wood to chipboard manufacture, textiles to fibre recovery, electricals through certified WEEE pathways, glass and paper through commercial recycling. Only material that genuinely cannot be reused or recycled — typically a small minority of the volume — goes for energy recovery or to landfill.
Where we work
Our standard service area is a 40-mile radius from central Edinburgh. That covers the entire City of Edinburgh, all of East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian, the populated parts of Fife as far north as Glenrothes and Kirkcaldy, the northern Scottish Borders including Peebles and Galashiels, and as far west as Stirling and Falkirk. See our locations page for a full list of towns we work in regularly.
We do not charge travel surcharges within this area. The quote you get for a clearance in Dunbar is calculated on the same basis as the quote for a clearance in Marchmont — by volume, access difficulty and time on site, not by postcode.