What Can and Cannot Go in a Dumpster in Illinois

Most pages with this title are a list of somebody’s house rules. This one is not. Illinois keeps six categories of material out of a landfill-bound container by statute, and every one of them has a section number you can look up. That is unusual. Plenty of states have one such rule. Illinois has six, and the way they are written — several of them as rules about the container rather than about the landfill — is the reason a roll-off on an Orland Park driveway is caught by them directly.

They are set out below in the order a homeowner actually meets them, with the citation for each. After the six, there is a shorter section on the material that is not banned but still causes trouble, and one on the routes that exist locally for the things that cannot go in the box.

One: landscape waste — 415 ILCS 5/22.22

This is the most important of the six for anyone with a container on a driveway, and it is the one that is almost always described wrongly. It is not written as a landfill rule. It is written as a container rule. The Illinois General Assembly’s own text of the section reads:

“Beginning July 1, 1990, no person may knowingly put landscape waste into a container intended for collection or disposal at a landfill, unless such container is biodegradable.”

And immediately before it: “Beginning July 1, 1990, no person may knowingly mix landscape waste that is intended for collection or for disposal at a landfill with any other municipal waste.”

Sit with the wording. A roll-off box is a container intended for collection and disposal at a landfill. It is not biodegradable. So grass, leaves, brush and branches raked into the box at the end of a work day are not a preference we have — they put whoever knowingly put them there in the path of a state statute. The section carries its own exceptions for municipal street sweeping and for material caught by bar screens or grates in a sewage treatment system, neither of which describes a driveway.

This is also the answer to a question nobody in this market seems to ask out loud: why are the Village’s yard waste bags made of Kraft paper? Because the statute says the container has to be biodegradable, and a paper bag is that container. The rule and the bag are the same fact seen from two ends. Yard waste has its own route here and its own season, and both are covered on Village collection, yard waste and spring clean-up and on why yard waste bags are made of paper. If you have a genuine volume of it — a hedge line out, a storm to clear — that is yard waste removal, handled separately from a mixed load.

Two: lead-acid batteries — 415 ILCS 5/22.23

Same shape, same container language. FindLaw’s current reproduction of the section, headed “Batteries”, gives subsection (f) as forbidding, from 1 September 1990, “the placing of a lead-acid battery into any container intended for collection and disposal at a municipal waste sanitary landfill” or “the disposal of any lead-acid battery in any municipal waste sanitary landfill or incinerator.” A later subsection extends the same prohibition, from 1 January 2020, to mixing a lead-acid battery with recyclables or placing one in a container intended for collection by a hauler for processing at a recycling center.

The statute defines what it means: “a battery containing lead and sulfuric acid that has a nominal voltage of at least 6 volts and is intended for use in motor vehicles”, and “motor vehicle” there “includes automobiles, vans, trucks, tractors, motorcycles and motorboats.” So this is the car battery, the lawn tractor battery, the boat battery and the motorcycle battery. The same section requires retailers who sell batteries to take used ones back one-for-one and to post a notice saying so. A garage clear-out in this village turns up more of these than anyone expects.

Three: white goods — 415 ILCS 5/22.28, and it is not a flat ban

This is the Illinois rule most often stated incorrectly on the open web, and getting it right explains something you have probably wondered about. Illinois does not simply ban appliances from landfills. FindLaw’s reproduction of the section, headed “White goods”, opens: “No person shall knowingly offer for collection or collect white goods for the purpose of disposal by landfilling unless the white good components have been removed.”

It is a component-removal requirement. The statute defines “white goods” to include “all discarded refrigerators, ranges, water heaters, freezers, air conditioners, humidifiers and other similar domestic and commercial large appliances”, and it defines the components that have to come out first: “any chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant gas”, “any electrical switch containing mercury”, “any device that contains or may contain PCBs in a closed system, such as a dielectric fluid for a capacitor, ballast or other component”, and “any fluorescent lamp that contains mercury.”

Now put that next to the Village of Orland Park’s own waste page, which says that white goods such as refrigerators, washers, dryers, water heaters, dishwashers, air conditioning units, dehumidifiers and dismantled toilets “may be placed at the curb for collection. These items will be recycled. Please call Customer Service… prior to collection.” That instruction to phone first is 415 ILCS 5/22.28 in action. Somebody has to take the refrigerant, the mercury switch and the capacitor out before the appliance goes anywhere, and that requires the appliance to be handled deliberately rather than swept up with everything else. Connect the two and a rule stops being an annoyance and becomes an explanation.

Practically: a fridge, a freezer, a window air conditioner or a dehumidifier does not belong in a mixed remodel load. The Village’s own curbside route exists for exactly this, and its published customer service number is (800) 964-8988.

Four: tires — 415 ILCS 5/55

FindLaw’s reproduction of the section, headed “Prohibited activities”, gives the operative sentence as: “No person shall knowingly mix any used or waste tire, either whole or cut, with municipal waste, and no owner or operator of a sanitary landfill shall accept any used or waste tire for final disposal”, subject to an exception for separated tires where the landfill maintains a means of shredding, slitting or chopping them and has Agency approval for an alternative use.

Note the exact wrong: it is knowingly mixing them with municipal waste. Four old tires in the back of a roll-off is precisely the thing the sentence names. The same section also contains a small, very quotable household provision — the prohibition on allowing water to accumulate in used or waste tires “shall not apply to used or waste tires located at a residential household, as long as not more than 4 used or waste tires at the site are covered and kept dry.” That is Illinois telling you plainly that a handful of tires stored properly at a house is a different thing from a pile, and that the box is not the answer for either.

Five: liquid used oil — 415 ILCS 5/21.6

FindLaw’s reproduction, headed “Materials disposal ban”: “Beginning July 1, 1996, no person may knowingly mix liquid used oil with any municipal waste that is intended for collection and disposal at a landfill.”

Then comes the subsection almost nobody quotes, and it is the useful one: “For purposes of this Section, ‘liquid used oil’ does not include used oil filters, rags, absorbent material used to collect spilled oil or other materials incidentally contaminated with used oil, or empty containers which previously contained virgin oil, re-refined oil, or used oil.”

So the ban is on the liquid. Illinois says in terms that oil filters, oily rags, oil-dry and empty oil containers are not liquid used oil. That converts a vague “no oil” instruction into a precise answer for a garage clear-out, which in a village where a quarter of residents are 65 and over and a great many garages have been in continuous use since the 1980s is a question that comes up constantly. Drain it, keep the liquid separate, and the rest of the shelf is a different problem.

Six: covered electronics — the Consumer Electronics Recycling Act, 415 ILCS 151/

Covered electronic devices may not go in the trash or to a landfill in Illinois. The governing law is the Consumer Electronics Recycling Act, which Illinois EPA describes as having been signed on 25 August 2017 and as modernizing the state’s electronics recycling program, superseding the earlier Act.

We are not going to publish a date for the ban, and here is the honest reason: three published sources give three different dates, and one of them is the Village’s own page. Rather than pick one, we will give you the two things that are not in dispute. First, covered devices are out. Second, here is the device list, quoted from Illinois EPA: “Computers and Small-Scale Servers, Computer Monitors, Electronic Keyboards, Mice, & Peripherals, Printers, Fax Machines, and Scanners, Televisions, DVD Players, DVD Recorders, and VCRs, Digital Converter Boxes, Cable Receivers, and Satellite Receivers, Portable Digital Music Players and Video Game Consoles.”

The Village publishes its own eighteen-item version of that list under the heading “Electronic Waste Ban”, and it names televisions, monitors, printers, computers of every kind, electronic keyboards, fax machines, VCRs, portable digital music players, DVD players, video game consoles, small scale servers, scanners, electronic mice, digital converter boxes, cable receivers, satellite receivers and DVD recorders.

Where the things that cannot go in the box actually go

A ban is only useful if there is a route, so here are the local ones, all from the Village’s own pages and Cook County’s own flyer.

• Electronics. Cook County lists only two permanent county electronics drop-off sites, and one of them is here: Orland Township Electronics Recycling, 16125 S. Wolf Rd, Orland Park, IL 60467, run by the Road District of Orland Township, phone (708) 403-5148, open Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. The county’s flyer adds a condition worth knowing before you load the car: “All televisions and computer monitors require either a prepurchased coupon from recycle.eworksesi.org or at the gate at drop-off (credit card only).” The county also advises calling ahead to confirm hours and accepted materials, which is sound — we could not retrieve that site’s own accepted-items list.
• White goods. The Village’s curbside route, with a call to (800) 964-8988 before collection.
• Household chemicals, automotive products, paint products, batteries, garden chemicals, fluorescent light bulbs, thermometers and thermostats, flammable items, syringes and lancets, swimming pool chemicals and consumer electronics. The Village publishes an “At Your Door Special Collection Service” covering those eleven categories, scheduled on 800-449-7587. The Village’s page does not say who pays or what is excluded, so we will not tell you either — ask when you book.
• Yard waste. Kraft paper bags, weekly, in season. See the Village’s waste management page.

Paint, and the one sentence that settles it

The Village’s page is unusually clear on this and it is worth quoting exactly: “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.” Liquid paint of any kind is not container material. Dried latex is a different thing from liquid latex, and oil-based paint is a different thing again — it is one of the eleven At Your Door categories.

“Clean construction or demolition debris” is narrower than you think

If you have heard the term CCDD and assumed it means construction debris, it does not. In Illinois it is a defined term, and Illinois EPA defines it as: “Uncontaminated broken concrete without protruding metal bars, bricks, rock, stone, or reclaimed asphalt pavement generated from construction or demolition activities.”

That is it. Concrete, brick, rock, stone and reclaimed asphalt, uncontaminated, with no rebar sticking out. Drywall is not CCDD. Wood is not CCDD. Shingles are not CCDD. A mixed remodel load is not CCDD no matter how tidy it is. Knowing the difference is the difference between a clean concrete load and a general one, which is why we ask whether a slab job is going to be kept separate. See concrete and heavy debris.

What the Village Code may add, and what we will not pretend to know

One honest limit. The Village Code has a chapter at Title 6, Chapter 5, titled “Landscape Waste Disposal”, and one of its eight sections is titled “Prohibited Items.” That is very likely the most directly relevant local provision there is for this subject, and we could not read its text. The chapter page in the Village’s code library returns section headings only. So we will tell you the chapter exists and that you can ask the Village about it at 708-403-6100, and we will publish none of its terms. “We could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none”, and this site tries hard not to confuse them.

The short version

• No landscape waste in the box — the statute is written about the container, and the container is not biodegradable.
• No lead-acid batteries — car, tractor, motorcycle, boat.
• No appliances with their components still in them — which in practice means no appliances in a mixed load.
• No tires — not whole, not cut, not four of them at the back.
• No liquid used oil — though filters, rags, oil-dry and empty containers are expressly not it.
• No covered electronics — and there is a permanent drop-off on Wolf Road, open forty hours a week.
• No liquid paint, and only dried latex in regular trash.

Everything else is a conversation. Call (708) 928-8633, describe what is coming out, and we will tell you what needs to be separated before the box arrives rather than after it is full. That call is the cheapest part of the job. More on junk removal, residential containers and what drives the cost.