Three Cubic Yards a Week, and Your Remodel

Here is a sentence that will surprise most people who live here, and it comes from the Illinois Municipal Code rather than from us. The Village of Orland Park could not put your bathroom gut into its garbage contract even if it wanted to. State law forbids it. Not discourages it, not leaves it to the Village’s discretion — forbids it, in a single sentence, for every Illinois municipality with fewer than a million people.

That sentence is the reason this page exists, and it sits on top of a second fact that is easier to check and just as useful: the Village’s residential collection takes up to three cubic yards of refuse a week and one bulk item. Three cubic yards a week is generous for a household. It is hopeless for a project. Put those two facts together and you have the whole honest explanation of why a remodel needs its own container, with no need to say a word about any hauler, ours included.

First, the thing this village does have

Start by giving the Village its due, because a lot of towns do not do this at all. Orland Park collects residential refuse, through a contract, and it bills it like a utility.

You can see that in the structure of the Village Code itself. Refuse collection is not filed under Title 6, Health and Nuisances, where you would go looking for it. It is Title 4, Water and Sewer, Chapter 12: Village Collection and Disposal of Garbage and Refuse, and its five sections are titled Residential Garbage and Refuse Collection; Establishment of Charges for Collection; Billing and Collection of Charges; Allocation of Partial Payments; and Appeal Process. The Village sets the charge, bills it, allocates partial payments and runs an appeal. It is a utility, not a private arrangement between you and a company.

We should say plainly that we could not retrieve the text of those five sections. The chapter page in the Village’s code library returns headings only, and every route we tried came back with the same table of contents. So what you have just read is what the headings establish and nothing more. Where we have not read something, we will tell you so on this site rather than write around it.

Second, the number: three cubic yards a week

The Village’s own waste management page is unusually specific, and the whole argument on this page comes out of it. Quoted exactly:

• “Households that receive curbside residential collection will be provided a 96-gallon refuse cart.”
• “Additional refuse materials that do not fit in the refuse cart may be placed in either plastic bags OR containers that are no greater than 45-gallon in size and do not exceed 50 pounds.”
• “Waste Management will take up to three cubic yards of refuse per week.”
• “One (1) bulk item will be collected with the weekly pick-up. A bulk item is considered an item the resident would take with them if they moved out of the residence (e.g., couch, small tables, mattress, etc.).”

Three cubic yards is a real allowance. For an ordinary week in an ordinary household it is more than most people use. The trouble begins the moment the week stops being ordinary.

A single bathroom gut is three to five cubic yards on its own — tub or surround, vanity, toilet, tile, backer board, the drywall behind it, the flooring under it — and it arrives in one afternoon, not spread over seven days. A kitchen is more. A finished basement coming back to bare block is a great deal more. A roof tear-off is in a different category altogether. Set the Village’s weekly figure against any one of those and the arithmetic answers itself: the service is sized for a week of living, not for a weekend of demolition. That is not a criticism of the service. It is what the service is for.

Third, and this is the good part: the bulk-item definition

Read that definition again, because it is one of the clearest lines any municipality in Illinois has written about waste:

“A bulk item is considered an item the resident would take with them if they moved out of the residence (e.g., couch, small tables, mattress, etc.).”

It is a test you can apply in your head, standing in the room, with no code book. Would you take it with you if you moved?

A sofa, yes. A dining table, yes. A mattress, a dresser, a bookcase — all yes. Those are bulk items, one a week, and the Village will take them.

Drywall does not move house with you. Neither do the old kitchen cabinets once they are off the wall, or the subfloor, or the tub surround, or the tile, or the joists out of a deck, or the shingles off a roof, or the paneling out of a basement. Those are not possessions that happen to be broken. They are pieces of the building. The Village’s definition draws the line exactly where the honest line is, and construction debris falls on the far side of it every time.

The definition even has a worked example in the Village’s own text. Carpet is treated as a bulk item — “must be cut and rolled into 4-foot lengths”, each roll “must not weigh more than 50 pounds”, all of it “secured with tape or string”, and “up to 8 rolls of carpeting and padding will be accepted each week.” Carpet is furnishing; it moves with you in principle. So it is in, with conditions. That is a Village drawing a line carefully rather than arbitrarily, and it tells you exactly where the line sits.

Fourth: why the Village cannot simply extend the contract

Here is where the page stops being about Orland Park and starts being about Illinois.

The Illinois Municipal Code section that lets a municipality contract for garbage collection — the section under which Orland Park’s own refuse contract exists — is 65 ILCS 5/11-19-1. It authorizes municipalities to make waste contracts with other units of government or with private companies, for terms of up to thirty years, and it sets out the notice and hearing machinery for doing so.

And in the middle of it sits this, in FindLaw’s current reproduction of the section:

“A municipality with a population of less than 1,000,000 shall not award a franchise or contract to any private entity for the collection of general construction or demolition debris from residential or non-residential locations.”

The same section separately provides that, on and after the effective date of the amendatory Act of the 100th General Assembly, a municipality of under a million “shall not enter into any new contracts with any other unit of local government, by intergovernmental agreement or otherwise, or with any corporation or person relating to the collecting and final disposition of general construction or demolition debris”, with a carve-out for municipalities that already had such a franchise or contract in place on that date.

A note on how we are citing this, because the detail matters. We cite it as 65 ILCS 5/11-19-1, with no subsection letter and no act number attached, and we attribute the text to FindLaw’s current reproduction of the section by name. We do that because the statutory language points only to “this amendatory Act of the 100th General Assembly” and we were not able to confirm an amending act number or a subsection letter from a primary source. It is also worth knowing that at least one statute reproducer on the open web still carries a 2014 snapshot of this section that omits the construction-and-demolition sentence entirely. If you go looking and cannot find it, that is probably why.

What that actually means on your driveway

Orland Park’s 2020 population was 58,703. Every municipality this business serves is far under a million people — Tinley Park at 55,971, New Lenox at 27,214, Mokena at 19,887, Orland Hills at 6,893, and so on down the list.

So the position is this. The Village runs a residential refuse contract. State law stops that contract covering your remodel. And no amount of goodwill at Village Hall can change it, because the prohibition is in the state statute, not in the contract.

That is worth understanding for a reason that has nothing to do with buying anything. It explains why the answer at the customer service desk is what it is. It explains why a neighbor who put three bags of tile out with the cart had them left behind. And it means that when a homeowner reasonably assumes the village-wide arrangement covers a bathroom gut, the assumption is not unreasonable at all — it is just cut off by a sentence in Springfield.

The village that can do almost everything, except this

There is a nice irony in it. Orland Park has more than 25,000 residents, so under Article VII, Section 6 of the Illinois Constitution it is a home rule unit automatically, with no referendum. And it has used that authority thoroughly. In a state with no mandatory statewide building code — the Illinois Capital Development Board says in terms that “a municipality or county is not required to adopt building codes” — Orland Park went and adopted its own stack: the 2018 International Building Code, the 2018 International Residential Code and the 2018 International Existing Building Code, expressly including IBC Appendix G, Flood-Resistant Construction. It adopted its own fire code. It licenses its own contractors as a precondition of any permit. It wrote its own dimensional rules for dumpsters and storage pods into its Land Development Code — 768 cubic feet, eight feet above grade, five feet from any lot line, thirty days — while requiring no permit at all. It made refuse a Village utility.

A village with that grip on construction inside its own boundaries, and the General Assembly has taken construction-and-demolition-debris collection out of its hands entirely. That is the shape of the thing.

Where the Village service ends and the container starts

Practically, here is the line as we would draw it for a homeowner in this village.

• The cart, plus up to three cubic yards a week, plus one bulk item handles ordinary household waste and the occasional piece of furniture. It is a good service and most weeks it is all anybody needs.
• Carpet is in, on the Village’s terms — four-foot rolls, under 50 pounds each, up to eight rolls a week, taped or tied.
• White goods have their own route: the Village says items such as refrigerators, washers, dryers, water heaters, dishwashers, air conditioning units and dehumidifiers “may be placed at the curb for collection. These items will be recycled. Please call Customer Service… prior to collection” on (800) 964-8988. That instruction to phone first is a state statute in action — 415 ILCS 5/22.28 requires the refrigerant, the mercury switch and the capacitor to come out before an appliance is landfilled.
• Paint is precise: “Paint must be dried out in the can in order to be collected. Only latex (water based) paint is allowed in regular trash once dried out.”
• Yard waste is a separate weekly program in season, in Kraft paper bags — and the paper is not an aesthetic choice. See Village collection, yard waste and spring clean-up.
• Anything that used to be part of the building is where the container comes in, and where state law says the Village’s contract cannot follow.

The five governments that decide your job

Every job in this village is governed by one of five, and it is worth knowing which is yours before you start.

• Any Orland Park driveway — the Village, which says “Permits are not required” and then sets four rules. See do I need a dumpster permit in Orland Park. Village Hall, 14700 S. Ravinia Avenue, 708-403-6100.
• A Cook County teardown — Cook County, with its own demolition permit, its own asbestos permit and a debris diversion plan. (312) 603-8200.
• A Will County teardown — and this is the honest one. Orland Park is mostly in Cook County and partly in Will, and Cook County’s ordinances do not reach the Will County part. We could not establish what Will County requires instead, so we do not publish it. See Cook County or Will County teardown costs.
• The road out front — the Village, a county department of transportation, or IDOT. The Village’s own engineering page says State and County work is “out of the Village’s jurisdiction.”
• Anything that digs — JULIE, statewide. Dial 811.

What to do with all this

If you are planning work in Orland Park, the sequence is short. Work out whether the debris is something you would take with you if you moved. If it is not, it is not going in the cart, and no phone call to the Village will change that, because the constraint is a statute rather than a policy. Then size the container against the job and against the Village’s 768 cubic feet, which is roughly 28.4 cubic yards — comfortable for a 20, a real question for a 30. Then check the driveway for the five-foot setback. Then book, allowing for the thirty days.

Call (708) 928-8633 and describe the rooms. Owner Dave Kolar would rather talk you into a smaller box and a second pull than sell you a bigger one that sits at a limit. See also residential dumpster rental, construction containers, the 20-yard and what can go in a dumpster in Illinois.