Should you haul it to the dump yourself?
Sometimes you should. A pickup bed of yard waste on a Tuesday morning is not worth paying anybody for. The trouble is that the trip goes wrong for reasons most people never see coming, and almost none of them are about what is in the truck.
The gate turns people away for who they are, not what they brought
This is the part that catches people. Thirteen of the nineteen counties around here run some kind of check on the person at the gate, separate from any rule about the load.
Cobb is the sharpest example. The transfer station takes a Georgia driver's license as the only acceptable proof of residence, and the gap between the resident minimum and the non-resident minimum is 56 dollars. Show up with an out-of-state license and a small load and the trip costs more than the job is worth.
Paulding refuses out-of-county loads on Saturdays, which is the one day most people are free to make the trip. Haralson wants a current annual permit and has an attendant checking for it at the entrance to every site. Cherokee County in Alabama runs a free dump day that requires you to produce your most recent garbage collection bill, or a City of Centre or Cedar Bluff water bill, to prove you live there.
Floyd is the bluntest of the lot. Walker Mountain refuses any material that originated outside Floyd County. Not a surcharge, a refusal. If you are clearing a relative's house one county over and planned to deal with it all in one run, that plan does not work.
What it costs when you do get in
Floyd County publishes its rates by weight band, which makes it the easiest one to plan against. The gate rate went from 38 dollars a ton to 46 dollars a ton on June 1, 2024. Below a ton it runs in steps.
| Load weight | Gate fee |
|---|---|
| Up to 250 lb | $10 |
| 251 to 500 lb | $15 |
| 501 to 750 lb | $20 |
| 751 to 1,000 lb | $30 |
| 1,001 to 2,000 lb | $40 |
| Over 2,001 lb | $46 a ton |
Inert material, meaning soil, concrete, cured asphalt, rock, brick and yard trimmings, runs cheaper through the same bands and 21 dollars a ton beyond them. Tires are charged by weight at 15 cents a pound.
The catch is that weight and volume come apart badly on the loads people actually haul. A trailer of books, tile, tools or wet carpet hits a ton while it still looks half empty. A trailer of couch cushions never gets close. If you have never weighed a load you are probably estimating from how full the truck looks, and that is the wrong axis.
Other counties price it differently enough to matter. Bartow gives residents the first ton free, but only for waste from their own house: rental property waste and contractor waste both fall outside it. Chattooga charges 20 dollars a ton more for waste from outside the county. Gordon's low landfill minimum is a resident rate. Each county publishes its own rates, so check the county's site or call the gate before you go.
What comes back home with you
Every county publishes a refusal list and they do not agree with each other. A few categories come up again and again across the whole region, and they are worth knowing before you load rather than after.
- Anything holding refrigerant. Fridges, freezers, window air conditioners. The refrigerant has to be recovered by somebody certified first, which is why these sit on porches for years.
- Tires still on the rim. Several counties take tires and refuse the same tire with the wheel attached.
- Mixed loads. Floyd refuses garbage mixed in with yard trimmings outright. Sorting on the tailgate at the gate is not a thing you get to do.
- Batteries, liquids, paint and anything hazardous. These need a household hazardous waste route, not a landfill.
- Asbestos. This is not a disposal problem, it is an abatement problem, and it needs a certified contractor before anything moves.
- Untarped loads. At least one county here refuses loads that are not tarped or tied down, and that is a rule about the drive rather than the contents.
The hours are narrower than you think
Walker Mountain runs Monday to Friday 8 to 4 and Saturday 8 to 2, and is closed Sunday. For anyone working a normal week that is one Saturday morning, and it is the same Saturday morning everyone else in the county is using.
Fort Payne closes at half past one in the afternoon and does not open at weekends at all. Several of the convenience center networks close on Mondays. Gordon asks you to arrive wearing a hard hat and a safety vest to enter the landfill, which is not a rule most people find out about in advance.
The arithmetic nobody does
The gate fee is the number people compare against a quote, and it is the smallest part of the cost. The honest version has more in it.
- The truck. If you do not own one, that is a rental plus fuel plus a deposit, and rental places charge by the day, not by the hour you actually needed.
- The loading. This is the real cost and it is paid in your back. A garage that looks like two hours is usually four, and it is four hours you were going to spend on something else.
- The trips. Weight limits and bed size mean one pile is rarely one load. Two or three round trips is common and each one is the same drive.
- The risk. If the load gets refused, every one of the above happened for nothing and the pile is back in your driveway.
Put a real number on your own Saturday and the comparison usually resolves itself. Not always. Sometimes the answer genuinely is that you should borrow a truck and do it, and if that is what the job looks like when you describe it to us, we will tell you so.
When it is worth calling instead
The pattern is fairly consistent. Self-haul makes sense for a small, clean, single-material load from your own house, in your own county, on a weekday, when you already have a truck.
It stops making sense when any of those stop being true. Mixed loads, anything with refrigerant in it, a house that is not yours, an out-of-county origin, a weekend, or a volume that needs more than one trip. That is the point where the gate fee stops being the number that matters.
Common questions
Can I take a mattress to the landfill?
It depends where you are. Some counties take them and charge per mattress, some route them separately, and the fee varies enough to be worth a call to your county before you load one up. What is consistent is that mattresses are bulky rather than heavy, so they cost more in space than the weight suggests.
Why will nowhere take my old fridge?
Refrigerant. It has to be recovered by somebody certified before the unit can be landfilled, and a county gate has no way to do that, so they refuse the whole appliance. It is the single most common thing sitting in a garage that its owner assumed was a normal dump run.
I live in one county and the house I am clearing is in another. Which rules apply?
The origin of the waste, not your address. Floyd is explicit that it takes nothing generated outside the county, and several others price out-of-county waste higher or refuse it on certain days. Where the load came from is what the gate cares about.
Is it cheaper to rent a dumpster instead?
For a long project with a steady trickle of debris, often yes, because the container sits there and you fill it on your own schedule. For a single clear-out that finishes in a day, you're paying for a rental period you don't use. The rough dividing line is whether the work runs longer than a day. If that's the shape of yours, we rent dump trailers: smaller than a roll-off, towed in and parked where you want it, and the disposal handled when it comes back. We don't rent roll-off dumpsters, so if the job genuinely needs one of those, that's a dumpster company rather than us.
Where to go next
Junk Removal
Full-service household junk removal. We load it, haul it, and sweep up after.
Appliance & Furniture Removal
The heavy single items, including the ones nobody else will take.
- What junk removal costs
- What construction debris removal costs
- What a dump trailer rental costs
- What deck removal costs
- What shed removal costs
- What above-ground pool removal costs
- What's actually free when you clear out a house
- Your old hot tub is four kinds of waste in one shell
- What has to happen before a mobile home can be demolished
- What goes on the trailer and what does not
- Every county and town we cover
Rather not spend the Saturday?
Tell us what you've got and where it is. We'll price it before anything moves.