
What is Honest Skip Hire with Integrity
SKIPS is a skip bin hire business that takes pride in treating its customers with transparent honesty and integrity. In this post, we want to alert potential customers to the tricks that some Victorian skip bin businesses are playing on inexperienced skip bin customers.
Make sure you are getting what you think you are paying for
Some unscrupulous skip bin operators are short-changing their customers on the size of skip bin they deliver. For more than 50 years, waste removal companies have been delivering skip bins based on quoting and selling them using the standard volume measurement of cubic metres. In recent year some of the largest waste businesses have been duping customers by quoting and selling skip bins using a nonsense non-existent measure (the marrel).
Volume Measurements you can rely on
The Waste Industry has been providing services based on simple volume measurements for more than 50 years. For Skip Bins, the quantity of waste has always been measured in cubic meters. A cubic metre is simply a box shape with equal-length sides of one metre.
To the right is a picture showing what a cubic metre in volume would look like in comparison to a typical man and woman.

The Shape of Skip Bins
The skip bins are not square boxes, but usually, they are trapezoidal in cross-section, both lengthwise and across (and rectangular in plan, when viewed from overhead). Here Google Gemini has drawn a wireframe of the shape of a 2 cubic metre bin represented as two parallel rectangles, the larger one above the smaller one, which is the base. The top rectangle is open so you can throw your rubbish in the bin for disposal. Honest Skip hire businesses will be happy to share details of the bins dimensions and the cubic metre volume of their bins.

What dodgy stuff is going on?
Well it all started with a shady Sydney business that invented a bin that was called a mini skip. People would call them up and ask them what their price on a 2 cubic metre skip bin was. They never said they didn’t have a 2 cubic metre bin, they just told the customer that they had a mini skip and gave them the price. Now I know you will find this hard to believe, but the mini skip was only 1.8 cubic metres in volume. The price was usually about the same or a little less than the price of other companies’ 2 cubic metre skip bins but it gave them a little edge that turned out to be very profitable for them. Shaving $5 off the price (which was like less than 5%) but reducing the volume by 10% worked for them, even if it was a bit dodgey. Infact it worked so well they started to create new terms for other-sized skip bins or hook lift bins (like the 13 H that was actually a 12 cubic metre bin).
So what is Happening More Recently?
In more recent times, a large waste business of some notoriety (after sponsoring some TV renovation shows) started to describe their bins as being a 2 marrel, a 4 marrel, a 6 marrel, and an 8 Marrel, etc. The volume of these bins bears no relationship to the numeric associated with the term marrel. For example, a 4 marrel is not 4 cubic metres in volume. The 4 marrel is actually only 3.4 cubic metres in volume. The same is true for the 6 marrel, it is not 6 cubic metres it is more like 5.3 cubic metres in volume.
Now other skip hire companies in both the Sydney and Melbourne marketplaces are also offering “marrel” based pricing, even though this is an imaginary and deceitful, non-existent unit of measure. These companies feel there is no other way for them to compete against one of the most dominant operators in the market
How to respoond to businesses quoting “marrel” prices?
Ask them what the cubic volume of the skip bin is? If they can not or don’t give a straight answer in cubic metres move on and get a price from a reputable, honest skip hire business that quotes based on cubic metres. We recommend that you look for honest skip hire companiies and avoiding those who price their services based on misleading marrels.













