How to Recycle Old Law Books in the UK

Old law books are mostly paper, so recycling them sounds easy, until you meet the hard covers, the glue and the weight of a whole library. And before any of them go, it is worth checking that they are past use, because some of what looks like waste paper may still be worth selling.

Can you recycle old law books?

Yes. The pages are paper, and paper is recycled. The awkward part is the binding. A hardback is a block of pages glued into a stiff cover, and a run of law reports in bound volumes is a whole shelf of hardbacks.

Councils treat hardbacks in different ways, so the first step is your own council's website. Here is how far apart the rules can be:

• Worcestershire asks you not to put books in the green recycling bin at all, "as books contain coatings and glues that make recycling via the kerbside difficult." It has book banks at six of its household recycling centres instead.
• Bromley takes hardback books in household recycling once the hard cover is off, because the cover of a hardback cannot be recycled.
• Lisburn and Castlereagh, in Northern Ireland, also asks you to remove the cover of a hardback before recycling it.
• North Yorkshire takes books free of charge at all of its household waste recycling centres, in book banks or a reuse container.

Search your council's site for "books" and it will tell you what yours does.

Removing a cover means cutting or tearing the pages away from it at the spine. That is quick for one book and slow for a hundred, which is worth bearing in mind before you start on a whole run of law reports.

Where can I take old books for recycling?

For books from your home, the place to take them is your council's household waste recycling centre, often called the tip. Some centres have book banks, and some have a reuse container for books that someone else could still read. North Yorkshire, for example, takes books at all of its centres, and Worcestershire sends tatty paperbacks from its paper banks straight to the paper mill.

What a centre takes, and whether it takes hardbacks, varies from council to council, so check your own before you load the car. A full library is many carloads, too, and books from a firm count as business waste, which has rules of its own.

Recycling law books from a firm or chambers

Books from a law firm or a barristers' chambers are business waste once you throw them out. GOV.UK's guidance on business waste says that "any waste that comes from a commercial activity is business waste", and it sets out what a business must do with it.

A business must keep waste to a minimum by doing everything it reasonably can to prevent, reuse, recycle or recover waste, in that order. It must check that its waste carrier is registered to dispose of waste, and complete a waste transfer note for each load of waste that leaves its premises. In England, it must also recycle dry recyclables such as paper and card. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own guidance, which GOV.UK links to.

That order is the useful part. Reuse comes before recycling, so a firm that sells or donates its books before calling a waste carrier is following the order the guidance sets out.

Recycling law books last, after selling and donating

First, find out whether the books are worth selling. Runs of law reports, sets of Halsbury's Laws and Halsbury's Statutes, and practitioner texts (the reference books lawyers turn to when they advise a client) are the kind of books we buy, and from the outside a set with a resale value looks much like one without. We value collections for free from photos of the shelves or a list. If you go ahead, we pack the books ourselves and collect them free from anywhere in the UK, and the money for them goes into your bank account. Where some of the books have little resale value, we can talk about collecting those free of charge along with the rest, which would save you taking them for recycling. Selling your law books to us explains how it works.

Second, offer the books that suit a new owner. The International Law Book Facility, a charity that gives second-hand legal books to not-for-profit organisations, accepts practitioner texts and university law textbooks. It turns down books more than ten years old, unless they are the last edition of a text, and you must contact it before sending anything. The Law Society library welcomes specific titles that would add to its collection, if you send it a list first. A library clearing stock can also use the Duplicates Exchange run by the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians, which the Law Society describes as a way to give away or sell unwanted materials three times a year. Our guide to donating law books has the full rules.

Third, recycle what is left. Recycling is for books that really are past use: water-damaged, mouldy or falling apart. Follow your council's rules for your own books, or use a registered waste carrier for a firm's.

Our guide to what to do with old law books sets out all of these routes side by side.

Before the law books go in the recycling

Send us photos first. Take them so every spine can be read, the tatty volumes as well as the good ones, and upload them to the valuation form or WhatsApp them to 07920 748314. We will value the collection for free and tell you which sets we can buy, so you know which books are worth selling before any go for recycling.