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 the city limits, weekly trash is already on your bill

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, which is what most people mean

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.

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.

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Where this service is available

TucsonOro ValleyMaranaSahuaritaVailCatalina FoothillsGreen Valley

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

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