You may have noticed that we recently stopped hauling yard waste. This isn’t because we don’t love helping you make your yard look great – it’s because once we pick it up, we don’t have a place to haul it!
Eau Claire’s yard waste disposal site can be used by Eau Claire County residents, but they’ve recently closed their brush disposal site to businesses – including businesses that haul yard waste on behalf of Eau Claire County residents.
Garbage companies are a mixed bag (pun intended) regarding yard waste. Earthbound Enviro stands out in the Eau Claire area as a company that handles yard waste and other compostable materials year-round for a nominal per-bag fee. They take it and compost it, so the stuff that came from the Earth can return to the Earth. The rest of the companies typically want you do something like put the yard waste in your regular (typically full) garbage can – and it gets hauled to the landfill, not to a recycling facility.
This means that for the majority of Eau Claire County residents who have yard waste, and want it handled in an environmentally-responsible manner, the main disposal option is to load everything up, drive it out to the disposal site, and pay the fees for disposal.
But November 1st through 5th, Eau Claire has partnered with local garbage hauling companies to offer FREE leaf & yard waste pickup and disposal throughout Eau Claire County!
How do you take advantage of this program?
- Call your local garbage company. Participation in this program is voluntary, so you’ll want to make sure you know that your garbage company is participating. You’ll also want to ask them about limits, if any, on how much yard waste you can set out for pickup.
- You have to bag it up. You need to use either paper bags or compostable bags. If you don’t have compostable bags, you can get good-sized ones at most “big box” stores or hardware stores.
- Set it by the curb. Make sure it’s all sitting out on the designated pick-up day.
- Sit back, and watch your yard waste ride off into the sunset (or sunrise, if your garbage company picks up early)!
As always, we encourage everybody to take advantage of these free recycling / disposal days. For complete details, contact your regular garbage company. And if you have any questions about the Eau Claire County Green Waste Facility, they have a page with complete information about what they do and don’t accept, pricing, and more.
And if you find more than yard waste during your fall cleanout, remember – we’re just a phone call away!