Georgia Disposal and Recycling Rules in Hall County

People sometimes think a dumpster company invented the reasons you need a dumpster. In Hall County we did not have to. Four separate rules, written by four different bodies over about sixty years, all close a different door on the same pile of debris. None of them were written with us in mind. Together they leave one lawful route.

Here is each rule, where it comes from, and what it actually forbids.

Four rules, one answer

Say you have a pile in the side yard. Storm limbs, some old fence, a bathroom's worth of tile and a tub, and the deck boards you pulled off last spring. Every instinct says burn part of it, haul part of it, and put the rest at the curb. In this county:

1. You cannot burn it between 1 May and 30 September, under Georgia EPD's summer open burn ban.
2. You cannot burn the building materials at any point in the year, under Hall County's own prohibition.
3. You cannot put the yard debris in a lined municipal landfill, under a Georgia statute that has been in force since 1996.
4. And the City will not collect it, while the county compactor sites are closed to commercial haulers.

That is the whole argument for a container, and every part of it is written down somewhere you can read for yourself.

Rule one: Georgia's summer open burn ban

Georgia EPD runs a statutory summer open burn ban from 1 May through 30 September each year, under Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 391-3-1-.02(5). It exists to hold down ground-level ozone during the hot months, and it covers 54 counties. Hall County is one of them.

During those five months, residents and businesses may not burn yard debris or land clearing material. The exceptions are narrow and they are not about cleanup: agricultural burning, certain forestry prescribed burning, campfires and barbecues, permitted firefighting training, open-flame equipment, and explosive disposal. EPD's own language is that failure to adhere to the ban may result in fines.

The first of May is a hard switch

Legal brush burning in north Georgia stops dead on 1 May. Every property owner who had been burning a pile through the spring needs a different route for the next five months, and that is exactly when severe weather season is dropping limbs across the county. The ban lifts on 1 October, and even then the open season is narrow: fallen leaves and small limbs from your own property, a pile no larger than six feet by six feet, fifty feet from any structure, an adult present, out before dark, and a permit from the Hall County Fire Marshal's office.

Rule two: Hall County will not let you burn building materials at all

The county's rules are stricter than the state's, and they do not have a season. Hall County prohibits burning building materials, furniture, plastic, rubber, tires and garbage year round.

Read that list against a renovation. Framing lumber, siding, cabinets, carpet, roofing, an old sofa, the plastic tub surround, the fence pickets. All of it is on the prohibited list twelve months a year, ban season or not. There is no October window for a demolition pile in this county. There never was one.

Rule three: yard trimmings are banned from municipal landfills

Georgia bans yard trimmings from lined municipal solid waste landfills under O.C.G.A. § 12-8-40.2, effective 1 September 1996. The definition sits at O.C.G.A. § 12-8-22(42): leaves, brush, grass clippings, shrub and tree prunings, discarded Christmas trees, nursery and greenhouse vegetative residuals and similar landscaping material. Land clearing debris such as whole trees and stumps is treated separately.

The ban applies at all municipal landfills with liners and leachate collection systems and at all municipal landfills that have received vertical expansions. What has to happen to the material instead is spelled out too: it is to be sorted and stockpiled, chipped, composted, mulched or otherwise beneficially reused or recycled to the extent feasible.

You can see the ban working at every level here. The Hall County landfill rejects yard debris, meaning trees, stumps, leaves and grass clippings. The county compactor sites prohibit yard trimmings. The City of Gainesville runs yard trimmings as its own separate collection stream rather than mixing them into garbage.

What this means for a mixed container

This is the rule that catches contractors from out of state. Brush cannot ride along on top of a remodel load. The moment yard trimmings go into a container bound for a lined municipal landfill, the load has a problem. Woody debris and green waste travel as a separate clean load to a facility that can take them. We cover the practical side of that on our yard waste removal page and in more depth in our guide to yard waste and brush removal in Gainesville.

Rule four: nobody is coming to pick it up

Hall County provides no residential curbside collection at all. That surprises people who move here from a metro county. What exists instead is 12 compactor sites plus the landfill, and unincorporated residents haul their own household waste to them.

• Compactor sites take bagged household garbage, in bags of 39 gallons or less.
• Yard trimmings are prohibited at the compactor sites.
• Commercial haulers who charge for disposal are excluded from the compactor sites entirely.
• The Hall County landfill rejects bulk concrete and asphalt, along with pressurized tanks and chemical, hazardous and liquid waste.
• Landfill tipping is a 20 dollar minimum covering up to 665 pounds, then 60 dollars per ton, as published.

Inside the Gainesville city limits there is city collection, and it stops at a short list. City of Gainesville Code Sec. 4-3-9 names, as items the city will not collect, discarded building materials, dirt, broken concrete, brick, rock and debris, plumbing fixtures including sinks, tubs, shower stalls and toilets, cabinets, doors, windows, roofing debris, lumber, siding, landscape timbers, crossties, carpet and floor coverings.

The city wrote our job description into its own ordinance. Every item on that list is a line item in a roll-off container.

The recycling side of the same system

Recycling in Hall County is a drop-off system rather than a collection system, which follows from there being no curbside service. The county runs a recycling center on Chestnut Street in Gainesville through its Resource Recovery Division, with a staffed weekday operation and a drop-off area available around the clock. The preparation rules are the ordinary ones: empty the containers, rinse anything that held food or drink, and flatten or cut the cardboard.

There is one recycling obligation that is easy to miss on the commercial side. Hall County Code requires the recovery of recyclable corrugated cardboard. On a plant renovation, a retail fit-out or a warehouse clear-out, cardboard is not simply another thing you may recycle if you feel like it. Plan a separate stream for it and the job runs cleaner and cheaper.

Household chemicals are the gap. We could not verify a standing year-round household hazardous waste drop-off in the county. Paint and refrigerant are handled at the landfill for a fee, and periodic county recycling events take a wider list. Call the landfill before you carry anything chemical anywhere.

Georgia's three landfill classes

Once you accept that the material has to go into a container, the next question is where the container goes. Georgia does not treat disposal sites as one undifferentiated thing.

That structure is the reason a clean load is worth the trouble to produce. A container of nothing but broken concrete, brick and rock has an inert destination available to it. The same material with household trash and brush thrown on top does not. Sorting is not tidiness. It is a legal question about where the load may be delivered.

Waste tires: three levels of law say no

Never put tires in a container in Georgia. O.C.G.A. § 12-8-40.1 provides that no person may store more than 25 scrap tires anywhere in this state, and that unprocessed scrap tires may not be placed in solid waste landfills unless shredded, chopped or chipped and meeting specified conditions. Exemptions exist for permitted disposal sites, tire retailers up to 1,500 tires, retreaders up to 3,000, licensed vehicle parts dealers up to 500, approved processors and farms up to 100 tires for agricultural purposes.

Hall County has its own scrap tire management chapter, and the City has its own section on the disposal of scrap tires. Sec. 4-3-9 also names rubber tires, wheels, automotive parts, acid, explosive material and flammable liquids among the things the city will not collect. Three levels of law, one answer. Tires go to a tire program, not into a roll-off.

What the state requires of the container itself

Georgia's solid waste rules do not only regulate landfills. Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 391-3-4-.06, the permit-by-rule for collection, transportation, processing and disposal, imposes conditions directly on collection operations.

• Vehicles and containers used for collection and transportation must be covered, substantially leakproof, durable, and of easily cleanable construction.
• Regular cleaning and maintenance is required.
• Contents must not fall, leak or spill during transport.
• No hazardous waste may be collected except under Georgia's Hazardous Waste Management Act.
• All waste must be deposited only at permitted facilities.

The last line is the one worth reading twice. There is no lawful cheap alternative to a permitted facility, which is why anyone quoting a price far below the market is worth a hard question about where the load is going.

It also explains a rule that annoys customers: do not load above the rails. A heaped container cannot be tarped, and an untarped load that sheds material on the highway is a violation of the condition above, not a matter of style.

Working inside the rules

None of this is complicated once you see the shape of it. Sort the pile into streams before you load it. Keep woody debris and green waste separate from everything else. Keep clean masonry separate from mixed debris. Keep tires, chemicals, pressurized tanks and anything hazardous out of the box entirely and call about them separately.

Do that and the material has a lawful destination in every case. Skip it and you have one contaminated load that has to go to the most expensive available site, assuming a site will take it at all.

If you want to read the rules yourself rather than take our word for it, the burn ban and the state disposal bans are published by Georgia EPD, the compactor site and landfill rules are published by Hall County, and the city's collection ordinance is on the City of Gainesville site. Fees and site rules move, so treat published numbers as published.

For construction and demolition specifically, keep reading in our guide to construction debris disposal in Georgia. To find out which rules apply at your address, check our service areas or call the yard at (470) 691-8287.