Tucson · Pima County

Trash removal in Tucson, AZ

Three different jobs share this name: setting up weekly collection, clearing a pile the barrel will not take, and emptying a whole property. Only one of them is a hauler’s work, and knowing which you have saves you a call.

Inside Tucson city limits, weekly trash is already on your bill

Inside Tucson city limits, weekly trash collection and the Brush and Bulky pickup are already paid for in your city services bill. A hauler is for what those two refuse: the pile that will not wait for the next Brush and Bulky date, and anything the city truck does not take at all.

City of Tucson Environmental Services collects from single-family homes and multi-family buildings of four units or fewer inside the city limits. The monthly fee on your utility bill covers weekly trash, recycling every other week, the twice-yearly Brush and Bulky collection and neighborhood cleanups. Containers are emptied Monday through Friday depending on where you are. If you have just moved in and nothing is being collected, that is a customer-service call to 520-791-3171, not a hauling job.

What the barrel will not solve is volume and timing. A barrel is a barrel, Brush and Bulky comes twice a year on your service area’s week, and neither one moves a couch out of a back bedroom. That is the line where this site starts being useful.

Outside the city limits there is no barrel to fill

Pima County puts it plainly: if you live outside the City of Tucson limits, you will need to either hire a solid waste hauler to pick up your garbage and recyclables or self-haul to a disposal facility. There is no county curbside route, and there is no county Brush and Bulky. That covers Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita, Vail, the Catalina Foothills and Green Valley: the addresses this site is asked about most.

Two consequences worth knowing. The county permits the haulers who run those subscription routes and requires them to offer recycling to residential customers, so a hauler quoting you weekly service without a recycling option is worth a question. And household hazardous waste — antifreeze, batteries, oil, paint — is taken free at county landfills and transfer stations, so it never belongs in a subscription bin or a hauler’s truck.

The one-time pile: the trash removal a hauler actually does

Weekly service and one-time removal are different products. If the pile is already there: a garage that filled up, a tenant’s leavings, a remodel’s worth of packaging, the contents of a shed — no barrel schedule fixes it and a subscription route will not take it either. It is priced by the space it occupies in a truck, not by weight or by the month: roughly $150 to $350 for a few items, $300 to $550 for a half load and $600 to $900 for a full one in the published ranges, with the cost guide working through what moves a quote inside those bands.

Before you pay for any of it, subtract. Anything still usable goes free to a donation truck, anything hazardous goes free to the drop-off, and inside the city limits anything that can wait for your Brush and Bulky week costs nothing at all. Cheap and free junk removal in Tucson runs that ladder in order.

Trash removal after a party, a tenant, or a storm: the one-time jobs a hauler actually takes

The weekly barrel handles a household's ordinary trash. The trash-removal calls a hauler gets are the piles that arrive all at once and will not fit in a barrel in a month of Thursdays.

• After an event. A wedding in the back yard, a quinceañera, a memorial gathering. Bagged trash by the dozen, folding-table cardboard, decorations, sometimes rented items that have to be separated out and returned. A crew takes the bags and the cardboard in one trip and the rental company takes its own.
• After a tenant. A unit left with bagged and loose trash, spoiled food in a dead refrigerator, and a mattress. This is the job where the hauler is worth every dollar, because nobody else will carry a fridge that has been off for three weeks in a Tucson August.
• After a storm. Not the branches, which belong on the storm cleanup page, but the ruined contents: a carport full of wet cardboard, a shed's worth of soaked boxes, the insulation that came down with the ceiling.

What ties them together is that the pile is mostly bagged or baggable, mostly light, and refused by the weekly truck because of volume rather than material. That combination is why the quote is usually at the low end of the truck fractions, and why the landfill fee on the invoice should be a small number.

Bagged trash, loose trash, and what the landfill charges for each

Los Reales charges by weight, not by bag, and bagged household trash is light. The published rate for a covered pickup load is about $20 (the base fee plus a two-dollar surcharge), and an uncovered load pays $10 more. That is what a hauler pays to tip a normal trash-removal job, and it is the reason the labor is most of the price: the tipping fee on a quarter-truck of bags is a fraction of what the crew charges to load it.

Loose trash is a different job. A pile that was never bagged has to be raked, shoveled and carried by the armload, which is slower and less pleasant than lifting bags, and it usually has things mixed in that the gate will not take at the household rate: paint, batteries, an old propane cylinder, a television. Bagging what can be bagged before the crew arrives is the single change that most lowers a trash-removal quote, because it turns a shoveling job into a lifting job.

Two things the landfill will not take with household trash at all, whatever the bag says: refrigerant appliances, which carry their own fee of about $20 a unit, and anything hazardous, which goes to the county's household hazardous waste program on its own schedule. A hauler that says it will take the paint cans with the bags is either separating them out for you or planning to hide them, and it is fair to ask which.

What the weekly barrel takes, what Brush and Bulky takes, and the gap a hauler fills

Inside Tucson city limits there are two free services and one paid one, and most trash-removal calls come from not knowing where the lines are.

• The weekly barrel takes bagged household trash that fits inside it with the lid closed. Not beside it, not on top of it. Extra bags left next to the barrel are the most common reason a street gets a code notice.
• Brush and Bulky comes on a schedule set by the city, takes up to a set volume per household from the curb, and takes furniture, appliances and cut brush stacked to its rules. It does not take dirt, rock, concrete, tires in quantity or anything hazardous, and it does not come early because you called.
• The hauler takes everything in between: the pile that will not wait for the next Brush and Bulky date, the bagged trash that outgrew the barrel after a cleanout, the load that mixes trash with things the city truck refuses.

Outside the city limits the picture is simpler because two of the three do not exist. There is no barrel unless you pay a private company for one, there is no Brush and Bulky, and the landfill is a drive. That is why the county calls are a bigger share of the trash-removal work than the population suggests, and why the quote for the same pile is usually a little higher out there: the truck is coming farther and going back farther.

The Brush and Bulky guide walks through the city schedule and the rules in detail, and it is the page to read before paying anyone to haul something the city would have taken for free on the next date.

What trash removal costs in Tucson: bagged loads by the fraction of the truck

Trash-removal jobs are the lightest loads a hauler carries, which is why they sit at the bottom of the volume ranges rather than the top. A dozen bags and some flattened cardboard is a few items to a quarter truck, $150 to $350 on the published Tucson ranges, and the landfill fee inside that number is around $20 because the load weighs almost nothing at the scale. A unit left full after a tenant, bags plus a dead refrigerator plus a mattress, is usually a half truck at $300 to $550 with the refrigerant fee on top. A full truck of trash is rare outside a hoarding cleanout, and when it happens the price is driven by crew time rather than weight: everything has to be bagged or carried by the armload, and a crew that expected to lift furniture spends the afternoon shoveling. The one thing that moves a trash quote most is whether the pile is bagged, and it is the one thing the customer controls. The cost page has every range side by side.

Home trash removal: what a hauler does that the barrel and the bulk pickup do not

Home trash removal, as people search for it, means one of two things. Inside Tucson city limits it means the pile that outgrew the barrel: a cleanout's worth of bags, a dead refrigerator, the mattress from the spare room. The barrel takes what fits under the lid, Brush and Bulky takes the rest on its own schedule, and a hauler takes it this week. Outside the limits it means there is no barrel at all, and the hauler is the trash service for anything that is not a weekly private pickup.

What a hauler adds in both cases is the carrying, the sorting and the destination. Bags and cardboard go to Los Reales by weight, the refrigerator carries its own fee, the mattress goes as bulky waste, and anything hazardous is set aside for the county program rather than hidden in the load. A quote for home trash removal should be at the low end of the truck fractions, because bagged trash is light, and it should say what happens to the appliance and the mattress by name.

Where it actually ends up

Almost everything tipped in this city goes to the Los Reales Sustainability Campus at 5300 E. Los Reales Road. The published gate rates are $18 for a covered load under 2,000 pounds, $38 a ton above that, $10 more if the load is uncovered, a $2 environmental fee on every load, $5 a tire and $20 for a refrigerator or freezer. Cards only, Monday to Saturday, 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.

That is about $20 of tipping on a pickup load, which tells you the rest of any quote is labor, truck time and the second stop for donations or hazardous material. If you want proof of where your load went, ask for the landfill receipt: a hauler who has one is a hauler who used the gate. How to choose a junk hauler lists the rest of the questions.

Call (520) 462-1120

Where this service is available

TucsonOro ValleyMaranaSahuaritaVailCatalina FoothillsGreen Valley

Local companies serving Tucson and Pima County; travel to outlying areas is usually included in the estimate — ask.

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