Why Orland Park Yard Waste Bags Are Made of Paper

Go out on a Tuesday morning between April and December and look at what is sitting on the parkway next to the carts. Grass and leaves are in brown Kraft paper sacks. Not the black bags the rest of the garbage goes in. Not a plastic tote. Paper — the kind that goes soft in the rain and splits if you overfill it.

People generally assume that is a preference. A tidiness rule, or something the collection contractor asked for, or a soft green gesture that could go either way.

It is none of those. It is a state statute, and the statute is written in a way almost nobody notices. Understanding why the bag is paper is also the fastest way to understand why a roll-off container is the wrong place for a load of grass clippings, and the right place for the four things the Village of Orland Park will not take at the curb at all.

The sentence that decides it

The provision is 415 ILCS 5/22.22, part of the Illinois Environmental Protection Act. The Illinois General Assembly’s own text of subsection (b) 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.”

Read that twice, because the shape of it is the whole point.

It does not say do not landfill your leaves. It does not regulate the leaves at all. It regulates the container. The offense described in subsection (b) is completed the moment landscape waste goes into the wrong receptacle — at the curb, in the driveway, on your own property — regardless of what happens afterwards.

The subsection immediately before it works the same way. Subsection (a): “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.” Again the rule is about the act of combining, not about the destination.

Subsection (d) carves out two narrow exceptions that tell you how literally the rest is meant: the section does not apply to landscape waste picked up as part of a municipal street sweeping operation where the intent is street sweeping rather than leaf collection, nor to landscape waste caught by bar screens or grates in a sewage treatment system. Those are the exceptions. A homeowner with a rake is not one of them.

And subsection (c) handles the receiving end. Sanitary landfills generally may not accept landscape waste for final disposal — but separated landscape waste may be accepted where the facility maintains composting operations and uses the compost as vegetative cover or soil conditioner, or where the landfill holds Agency authorization to use processed landscape waste as alternative daily cover. That word separated is going to matter later on this page.

So the bag has to be biodegradable, and paper is the biodegradable bag

Once you see subsection (b) as a container rule, the Kraft paper sack stops being a quirk and becomes the obvious engineering answer. The statute permits landscape waste to go into a container if the container is biodegradable. A paper sack is. A plastic bag is not. A wheeled cart is not, which is why a yard-waste cart is a cart used for a separated stream rather than a container bound for a landfill.

The Village of Orland Park’s own waste page states the requirement without explaining it: yard waste “must be placed in Kraft paper bags, which can be purchased at local retail stores.” That is the Village implementing a 1990 state statute, thirty-odd years later, one sack at a time.

What the Village’s yard-waste program actually is

Worth having in front of you, because most of the disputes we hear about are people running into one of these five rules without knowing it existed. All of it is quoted from the Village’s own Public Works waste-management page.

• The season. Yard waste — “grass clippings, leaves, tree branches and brush” — is collected weekly on your scheduled pick-up day from April 1 through the second full week of December. That is roughly thirty-six weeks on and sixteen weeks off.
• The container. Kraft paper bags. The Village also notes that 96-gallon yard-waste carts can be rented or purchased through the collection contractor’s customer service line, published by the Village as (800) 964-8988.
• The brush rule. “Brush and branches must be cut into 4-foot lengths and bundled with string or twine. Each bundle must not exceed 50lbs.”
• And the sentence people find out about the hard way: “Unbundled brush will not be collected.” A loose pile of limbs at the curb is not a slow pick-up. It is not a pick-up.
• The set-out time. Everything, yard waste included, has to be at the curb no later than 6:00 a.m. on collection day.

None of that is unreasonable. All of it is designed around a person with a rake, a pair of loppers and an afternoon. It is not designed around a project.

The four words the Village prints, and why each one is a container job

Here is the sentence that matters most to anybody clearing land, taking out a hedge line, regrading a yard or cleaning up after a storm. The Village publishes it verbatim:

“Please note that sod, whole trees, stumps, and dirt are not part of the weekly yard waste program.”

And alongside it: “Whole trees and limbs greater than 4 inches in diameter and stumps are not included in the weekly pick-up.”

Four nouns and a diameter. Every one of them is a classic roll-off load, and for reasons that are worth spelling out one at a time, because they do not all behave the same way.

Sod

Sod is soil with a lawn attached, and soil is the densest thing most homeowners ever ask a container to carry. A lawn strip-out looks like nothing in a wheelbarrow and turns into a weight problem immediately. Sod belongs in a small box loaded shallow — a 10-yard container is usually the right answer, and if somebody offers you a bigger one for a sod job, ask them what they expect to do with the top two-thirds of it.

Dirt

Same physics, more of it. Excavated soil from a patio base, a footing, a pool backfill or a regrade is the one material where a small container is not a compromise but the correct specification. Clean soil and clean broken concrete also sit inside a defined Illinois category — clean construction or demolition debris, which Illinois EPA defines narrowly as “uncontaminated broken concrete without protruding metal bars, bricks, rock, stone, or reclaimed asphalt pavement generated from construction or demolition activities” — but the moment soil is mixed with roots, sod, plastic sheeting or landscape fabric, it is no longer a clean stream. Keep it separate on the ground, not in your head. See our heavy debris page for how those loads are handled.

Whole trees and limbs over four inches

The four-inch line in the Village’s rule is a good one, because four inches is roughly where a limb stops being something you can bundle and starts being something you have to cut, stack and lift. Green hardwood is heavy — a fresh oak limb carries a great deal of water — and this is oak country. After the July 2026 storms, the local paper described “numerous overturned oak trees” in the City of Palos Heights alone. A tree that came down whole is a yard-waste container job, cut to length, loaded flat, and it is the one category where we would rather talk to you before the saw comes out.

Stumps

The hardest single item in residential debris. A stump arrives with a root plate, and a root plate arrives with soil in it — so a stump is simultaneously a bulky item and a dense one. Ground stump chippings are a different and much easier proposition than a stump that has been pulled. Tell us which one you have.

What all of this means for the box on your driveway

Now the part that follows directly from 22.22(b), and that we would rather say plainly than leave for somebody to work out later.

A roll-off container is a container. It is steel, it is not biodegradable, and a mixed load leaving a remodel is on its way to disposal. Which means that quietly tipping the grass catcher or a hedge trimming into the corner of a construction box is not a housekeeping question. It is the exact fact pattern subsection (b) describes.

The way out of that is the word the statute itself uses: separated. Landscape waste kept as its own clean stream, in its own container, is handled as landscape waste and goes where landscape waste is allowed to go. Landscape waste buried in the middle of a load of drywall, carpet and cabinet doors is not separated, and nobody downstream can un-mix it.

So the operational rule for a container in Orland Park is short:

• Tell us up front if the job produces yard waste, even a little. It changes what we bring and how the load is handled, and it is a far easier conversation before delivery than after collection.
• Do not top off a remodel box with brush because there is room. Room is not the constraint here; the statute is.
• Do not put sod or soil in a container that also has construction debris in it if you can possibly avoid it. Two clean loads beat one mixed one every time.
• Bag what the Village will take, in paper, and save the container for the four things it will not.

The sixteen weeks when there is no curbside option at all

The Village’s yard-waste season runs April 1 through the second full week of December. From mid-December to the end of March there is no weekly yard-waste collection at all, and that window happens to contain the worst of the weather. The National Weather Service’s 1991–2020 normals for Chicago O’Hare put January and February together at about 22 inches of snow, with March averaging 5.5 inches of snow against a 47°F average high. Those are O’Hare’s numbers, not Orland Park’s, but they describe the season fairly.

What that means practically: a January ice storm that takes down half a silver maple has nowhere to go through the curbside program until April. That is one of the few genuinely seasonal reasons a homeowner here needs a container rather than patience, and it is worth knowing in advance rather than in February. Our storm debris guide deals with the aftermath of a large event specifically.

The same sentence shape, five more times

Once you have noticed how 22.22 is drafted, the rest of the Illinois landfill bans read very differently. There are six of them, and they are not all the same kind of rule — which is why so much of what gets written about them online is wrong.

• Landscape waste — 415 ILCS 5/22.22. A container rule, as above.
• Lead-acid batteries — 415 ILCS 5/22.23. The same container language appears again. FindLaw’s current reproduction of subsection (f) prohibits “the placing of a lead-acid battery into any container intended for collection and disposal at a municipal waste sanitary landfill.” Retailers have to take them back, one for one.
• White goods — 415 ILCS 5/22.28. Not a flat ban, and this is the one everybody misstates. It is a component-removal rule: no person may knowingly offer for collection or collect white goods for landfill disposal “unless the white good components have been removed” — the refrigerant, the mercury switch, the PCB capacitor, the mercury lamp. That is precisely why the Village’s page tells you to “call Customer Service…prior to collection” before a refrigerator goes to the curb. A rule turns into an explanation the moment you connect the two.
• Used and waste tires — 415 ILCS 5/55. The prohibition is on knowingly mixing used or waste tires with municipal waste. Also in the same section, a nice concrete number for a garage clear-out: the water-accumulation prohibition does not apply to used or waste tires at a residential household “as long as not more than 4 used or waste tires at the site are covered and kept dry.”
• Used oil — 415 ILCS 5/21.6. Liquid used oil may not knowingly be mixed with municipal waste intended for landfill collection and disposal. And the subsection almost nobody quotes, (c), says “liquid used oil” does not include used oil filters, rags, absorbent material used to collect spilled oil, or empty containers that previously held oil. That converts a vague rule into a usable answer.
• Electronics. Covered electronic devices may not go in Illinois trash or a landfill, under the Consumer Electronics Recycling Act, 415 ILCS 151/. We do not publish a start date for the ban, because three reputable sources give three different dates and we could not resolve it. The device list and where to take a television are handled in our downsizing and estate cleanout guide.

The statutory text for the last five is quoted here from FindLaw’s current reproduction of the Illinois Compiled Statutes; 22.22 is from the General Assembly’s own text.

One thing we looked for and could not read

The Village Code has a Title 6, Chapter 5 titled “Landscape Waste Disposal,” with eight sections, one of which is § 6-5-6, “Prohibited Items.” On the face of it that is the most directly relevant ordinance section in the entire Village Code for anything to do with yard waste and containers.

We could not read its text. The chapter page publishes headings only from every route we tried, and we are not going to characterize a prohibition we have not read. If your job is anywhere near that line, the Village is the right desk: (708) 403-6100. “We could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none,” and we would rather say the first than imply the second.

The short version

• The bags are paper because 415 ILCS 5/22.22(b) is a container rule — landscape waste may not go into a container intended for collection or landfill disposal “unless such container is biodegradable.”
• The Village collects yard waste weekly, April 1 through the second full week of December, in Kraft paper bags, brush cut to 4-foot lengths and bundled under 50 lb.
• “Unbundled brush will not be collected.” That is the Village’s sentence, not ours.
• “Sod, whole trees, stumps, and dirt are not part of the weekly yard waste program,” nor are limbs greater than 4 inches in diameter. Those five things are what a container is actually for.
• Keep landscape waste separated from construction debris, in both directions.
• Sod and dirt want a small box, not a big one.

Call (708) 928-8633 and tell us what the pile is made of — grass and leaves, brush over four inches, a stump with soil on it, or a mix — and we will tell you which container that is and how to keep the load clean. More on yard waste removal, on residential containers, and in the guide to the Village’s own collection program. The Village’s waste pages are at orlandpark.org, and Illinois EPA’s waste-management material is at Illinois EPA.