Rules

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

Some of what we cannot take has a free local route. Farm properties in particular turn up more of it than anyone remembers.

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.

This matters more here than in cities with a bulk program, because Altoona has none — so furniture that elsewhere would go to the curb has to go somewhere, and usually that is a container.

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.

Concrete, brick, stone and masonry

All fine, all extremely heavy. Slab, footings, brick, block, pavers and the local stone all 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
• Agricultural chemicals — pesticides, herbicides, treatments
• Contaminated soil
• Fluorescent tubes and older ballasts

Worth noting that the transfer station on East 6th Avenue does not accept hazardous waste either, so "I will just run it down there" is not an answer for any of the above.

The local routes worth using first

Several prohibited items have a proper destination locally. Use it before you pay anybody.

Electronics — televisions, computers and related devices — go to the Buckhorn facility through the IRC. An older house here will produce more of these than anyone expects.

Yard waste goes through the IRC for the three member municipalities, and it is unusually flexible: loose, bundled with twine, or in paper bags, with bagged grass clippings explicitly accepted. Hollidaysburg also runs seasonal leaf and brush collection in spring and autumn. Detail here.

Household hazardous waste — paint, solvents, fuel, motor oil, garden chemicals, batteries — needs a proper collection route. These change, so check the current arrangements with your municipality or the county rather than relying on something you heard a while ago.

Scrap metal has positive value and a real trade in this area. Appliances, metal frames, ductwork and cast iron plumbing are all worth pulling out rather than burying in a mixed load.

Treated timber is the common trap

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

Clean untreated wood and green waste — branches, brush, prunings — is yard waste. It has its own route and its own cheaper disposal 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 clean 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.

⚠️ Farm and barn clearances

This deserves its own section because it is a genuinely different job, and out in Morrisons Cove, Sinking Valley and the townships it is a large part of what we do.

A barn or farm outbuilding that has been in use for decades will typically contain, somewhere in it:

• Old fuel — diesel, petrol, kerosene, in cans and in tanks
• Agricultural chemicals — some of them decades old, some in unlabelled containers
• Waste oil and hydraulic fluid
• Tires, often a great many, and often part-buried
• Batteries — tractor, vehicle, tool
• Asbestos in older roofing sheets, siding and pipe lagging
• Scrap metal in real quantity, which is worth money

Three pieces of advice we give every time:

1. Walk the building before we arrive and pull everything on that list. Once material starts moving, small containers of chemicals get buried and end up loaded.
2. Do not open or decant unlabelled containers. If you do not know what it is, treat it as hazardous and get advice.
3. Assume older roofing sheets and siding need testing before demolition. Farm buildings of a certain age routinely contain asbestos products.

The scrap metal is the compensation: on most barn clearances it is worth enough to make a real dent in the disposal cost.

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 or a chest freezer in a basement or a garage here.

Mattresses

Fine in a container. With no municipal bulk collection in the City, a container or a private special collection are the two realistic routes.

Cast iron plumbing

Perfectly acceptable, and common in the railroad-era housing. Heavy, and worth real money as scrap, so pull it rather than burying it.

Plaster and lath

Acceptable, and much heavier than drywall for the same wall area. Size down and expect to fill it.

Old paint cans

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

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, roofing felt and textured ceilings tested before demolition starts. A licensed abatement contractor handles it from there.

A pre-load checklist

• Walk the basement, garage, shed and any outbuilding and pull every chemical before anything else moves
• Check for batteries: power tools, garden equipment, vehicles, emergency lights
• Pull out propane cylinders and aerosols, including "empty" ones
• Set electronics aside for the Buckhorn facility
• Check for the second fridge or chest freezer as well as the obvious one
• Put tires aside for a tire retailer or scrap dealer
• Decide whether your wood is clean or treated — and keep them apart
• Separate concrete, stone, brick and plaster into their own container
• Pull the scrap metal, including cast iron plumbing
• On a farm job, assume there is more fuel and chemical than you remember
• Bag or bundle yard waste separately for the IRC
• Load flat and heavy first, bulky on top, and stop at the rail