Yard Waste Removal in Orland Park, IL

This page starts with a statute rather than a service, because in Illinois the statute is the reason the service looks the way it does. 415 ILCS 5/22.22 — the state’s landscape waste provision, and one of the few we were able to read from the General Assembly’s own site — says this: “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 the shape of that sentence. It is not a rule about landfills. It is a rule about containers. A roll-off box is a container intended for collection and disposal at a landfill, which is exactly why clean grass, leaves and brush do not belong in one — and why the Village of Orland Park’s own yard waste bags are made of Kraft paper rather than plastic. A paper sack is the biodegradable container the statute is describing. Nobody else in this market explains that, and it is the whole reason the parkway looks the way it does in October.

So what does the Village actually collect? Weekly, on your regular pick-up day, from April 1 through the second full week of December: grass clippings, leaves, tree branches and brush, in Kraft paper bags bought at local retailers, or in a 96-gallon yard waste cart available to rent or purchase through the Village’s published collection number, (800) 964-8988. Brush and branches must be “cut into 4-foot lengths and bundled with string or twine”, with no bundle over 50 pounds. And then the sentence that decides half the calls we get: “Unbundled brush will not be collected.”

Then the refusal list, which the Village publishes verbatim and which is worth memorizing if you own a mature lot here. “Please note that sod, whole trees, stumps, and dirt are not part of the weekly yard waste program.” And separately: “Whole trees and limbs greater than 4 inches in diameter and stumps are not included in the weekly pick-up.” Every single one of those is a classic roll-off load. Sod off a re-graded lawn. A tree that came down. A stump ground or pulled. Dirt from a footing or a raised bed. A limb thicker than your wrist. The Village is not being difficult — a compactor truck on a residential route is simply not the tool for any of them. That gap is exactly the shape of this service.

The storm case deserves its own paragraph, because in this village it is not theoretical. The National Weather Service confirmed an EF-0 tornado on 27 July 2026 with the summary line “3 NW Orland Park” — 2.9 miles, 85 mph, 250 yards at its widest — one of seven confirmed across the forecast area that day, and nearly 9,000 ComEd customers in the village lost power. In the same storms the City of Palos Heights reported “numerous overturned oak trees.” A mature oak on the ground is whole trees, limbs over four inches and often a stump, all at once — which is to say, every item on the Village’s refusal list in a single afternoon. And the 15 July 2024 derecho produced 32 confirmed tornadoes across the NWS Chicago forecast area, a record for that office, with 11 in Cook County and 6 in Will. This happens here.

One last distinction worth getting right, because people mix the two up constantly. Soil and sod are not landscape waste in the statutory sense — but they are dense, and dense material is a weight question rather than a volume question. Clean brush and clippings are landscape waste and are the thing the statute keeps out of a landfill-bound container. So a job that produces both wants two different answers: bagged brush to the curb inside the season, and the sod, the spoil, the stumps and the heavy timber into a container sized for weight. Ring (708) 928-8633 and describe what is actually on the ground.

The Four Things The Village Will Not Take

Sizing A Vegetation Or Clearing Load

Vegetation loads split into two behaviours and the mistake is treating them as one. Brush, limbs and light woody material are bulky and awkward but not especially heavy, and they do not stack — so they want volume. A 20 yard is the usual answer for a serious clear-down, and a 15 suits a single tree or a fence line. Sod, soil, spoil, ground stump material and large trunk sections are dense, and dense material reaches a lawful road payload long before it fills anything, so it belongs in a 10 yard loaded flat across the floor. A job that produces both — which most clearing jobs do — runs best as two boxes rather than one, because the brush is what fills the container and the soil is what stops it moving. And a note that matters on a residential driveway: the Village caps a residential unit at 768 cubic feet, about 28.4 cubic yards, with a maximum of eight feet above grade, so a 30 is a size to discuss rather than assume. Cut everything to lengths that lie flat — a limb bridging the box is volume you paid for and cannot use. Ring (708) 928-8633.

Why The Bags Are Made Of Paper

Three things to get right on a vegetation job here, and the first one is legal rather than practical. Keep clean landscape waste out of the roll-off. 415 ILCS 5/22.22 is written about the container: no person may knowingly put landscape waste “into a container intended for collection or disposal at a landfill, unless such container is biodegradable”, and the same section also forbids knowingly mixing landscape waste intended for collection or landfill disposal “with any other municipal waste.” The Village’s weekly program is the route for clean grass, leaves and bundled brush inside the season — April 1 through the second full week of December, in Kraft paper bags, brush cut to 4-foot lengths and bundled under 50 pounds, because “Unbundled brush will not be collected.” What the container is for is the material the Village names as outside that program: “sod, whole trees, stumps, and dirt” and “limbs greater than 4 inches in diameter.” Sort as you stack, not afterwards. Second, the ground. Clearing work happens on lawns and verges rather than driveways, and this village is built on the clay-rich Wadsworth Formation over the Valparaiso Morainic System — ground that holds water instead of shedding it. Timber or plywood goes down before the box does, under all four wheels and under both rear rollers, and even then we would far rather leave the container on the drive and let you barrow twenty feet than set a loaded one on soft turf. This matters most in spring: on the National Weather Service’s Chicago O’Hare, 1991–2020 normals, March averages 5.5 inches of snow against a 47 °F average high, and freeze-thaw on clay is the worst combination of the year for weight on the ground. Third, JULIE, because clearing digs more often than people admit. Stumps, root balls, new bed excavation, fence posts, tree planting — JULIE’s own excavator guidance says pre-marking in white paint, flags or chalk is “the law!” and that it applies to everything “from planting a single tree to adding all new landscaping.” Dial 811, allow JULIE’s “at least 3 days”, and hand-dig inside the eighteen-inch tolerance zone. And keep the top of a light load below the rail with a tarp over it: a box of leaves and light brush on a windy afternoon is a litter problem for the whole street.