Rules

What Can and Cannot Go in a Dumpster: The Local List

Some of what we cannot take, the City or the county will handle for nothing. Worth knowing which is which before you load.

The short version

If it came out of a building, a yard or a household and it is solid, non-hazardous and not under pressure, it can almost certainly go in the container. If it is liquid, toxic, pressurised, electronic or contains refrigerant, it cannot.

That covers about ninety-five percent of questions. The rest of this is the other five percent, which is where the money and the headaches live.

What you can put in

Household and furniture

Sofas, armchairs, bed frames, mattresses, tables, wardrobes, bookcases, desks, carpet and underlay, rugs, window coverings, toys, books, paperwork, kitchenware, patio furniture, grills with the propane tank removed, exercise equipment and general clutter.

Construction and renovation debris

Drywall, plaster and lath, timber, plywood and sheet goods, doors, windows, trim, kitchen cabinets, countertops, tiling, laminate and vinyl flooring, insulation, siding, soffit and fascia, guttering and fencing.

This is the category the City will not take at all, so it is the main reason most of our containers go out.

Concrete, brick and masonry

All fine, all extremely heavy. Slab, footings, brick, block and pavers belong in a 10 yard, part-filled, and kept clean — clean material has a cheaper route.

Roofing

Composition shingle, felt and underlayment, flashing and decking. Weight is the constraint, not acceptability.

What is prohibited

• Liquids of any kind — paint, stains, solvents, thinners, oils, fuels and pool chemicals
• Batteries of every kind, lithium especially — a real fire risk in a loaded container and on a tipping floor
• Propane, gas and pressurised cylinders, including "empty" ones, and aerosols
• Electronics — televisions, monitors, computers
• Refrigerant-charged equipment that has not been professionally evacuated
• Asbestos-containing material
• Medical and infectious waste, including sharps
• Tires
• Ammunition — explicitly excluded from City routes and never in a container either
• Contaminated soil
• Fluorescent tubes and older ballasts

The free routes worth using first

Several of the prohibited items have a free destination locally. Use it before you pay anybody.

Household hazardous waste — paint, solvents, fuel, motor oil, garden and pool chemicals, batteries — goes to Wayne County, which runs collection events for county residents and operates a voucher program for drop-off at a contractor site. Check the county's current arrangements directly; the details change and a remembered address is not good enough for a load of chemicals.

Bulk household items — furniture, mattresses, appliances — go at the curb within the City's limits, or free to the DPW Yard at 2951 Greenfield Road on the third Saturday of each month. The Yard's rules are here, and they are narrower than people expect.

Tires are accepted by the City only on designated tire collection days. The four in the corner of the garage need that day, a tire retailer or a scrap dealer.

Paper can go to a City shred day at the Yard, which is the right answer for anything confidential from a house clearance.

Treated timber is the local trap

Worth its own section, because it costs people money on almost every yard project.

Clean untreated wood and green waste — branches, brush, prunings — is yard waste. It has its own City stream in season and its own cheaper disposal route in a container.

Treated timber is not. Pressure-treated lumber, painted or stained wood, laminated products and anything with a finish are excluded from the green stream.

The practical problem is that most exterior wood on a property here is treated — fence posts, deck boards, patio structures, landscape ties, raised beds. So a "wood" container from a yard demolition is usually not a clean wood container at all.

Tell us which you have. A clean load and a treated load go to different places, and mixing them turns the cheap one into the expensive one.

The grey areas people ask about

Appliances with a compressor

Fridges, freezers, window air conditioners and dehumidifiers need the refrigerant professionally evacuated first. There is nearly always a second fridge in the basement here.

Mattresses

Fine in a container, and also eligible as a curbside bulk item within the City's limits. Bulky either way, so they eat volume.

Cast iron plumbing

Perfectly acceptable, and common in the pre-war housing across the older cities. It is also heavy and worth real money as scrap, so pull it out rather than burying it in a mixed load.

Plaster and lath

Acceptable, and much heavier than drywall for the same wall area. A pre-war strip-out sizes down and still fills the container.

Old paint cans

Empty and fully dried with the lid off, generally fine. Anything with liquid paint in it is household hazardous waste and goes to the county.

Asbestos

Not in our containers. In any building predating 1980 — which is a large share of the housing across this area — get floor tile, pipe lagging, siding and textured ceilings tested before demolition starts. A licensed abatement contractor handles it from there.

Basements are where the problems hide

Worth its own section, because nearly every house here has one and it is where the prohibited items accumulate.

A typical basement in a long-held house holds: paint from four decades of redecorating, fuel for the mower, motor oil, the old chest freezer, a workbench with solvents and adhesives, batteries in tools nobody has used in years, and often a second fridge.

Three things that matter:

• Clear the chemicals first, before anything else moves. Once boxes are stacked in front of a shelf, the shelf gets forgotten.
• Check for damp damage. Anything that has sat wet is heavier and may need different handling.
• Look behind and under everything. Fuel cans and battery packs are small enough to be loaded without anybody noticing, and both are genuine fire risks in a loaded container.

A pre-load checklist

• Walk the basement, garage and shed and pull every chemical before anything else moves
• Check for batteries: power tools, garden equipment, e-bikes, emergency lights
• Pull out propane cylinders and aerosols, including "empty" ones
• Set electronics aside for proper recycling
• Check for the second fridge as well as the obvious one
• Put tires aside for a collection day or a tire retailer
• Decide whether your wood is clean or treated — and keep them apart
• Separate concrete, brick and plaster into their own container
• Pull the scrap metal, including cast iron plumbing
• Send paint and chemicals to Wayne County
• Spend the City's free bulk allowance on genuine furniture first
• Load flat and heavy first, bulky on top, and stop at the rail