Yard Waste and Brush Removal in Gainesville, Georgia

A customer called last June with four hardwoods down after a thunderstorm and a plan. He was going to burn it. Then he was going to run the rest to the compactor site. Then he figured the county landfill would take whatever was left.

All three of those doors were already closed, and none of them closed for the same reason. That is the thing about brush in Hall County. It is not one rule you can work around. It is four separate rules, written by four different bodies, and they all point at the same answer.

Rule one: you cannot burn it for five months of the year

Georgia EPD runs a summer open burning ban that covers Hall County among a long list of counties, under Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 391-3-1-.02(5). It runs from 1 May through 30 September. During those five months there is no outdoor burning, and the ban does not care how carefully you were planning to do it.

Note what that means for the calendar. The single busiest stretch for storm limbs, land clearing and yard renovation is the same stretch when burning is off the table entirely. The switch flips on the first of May, and every property owner who was burning brush in April needs a different route the next morning.

Even in the open season, the rules are narrow

From 1 October through 30 April, Hall County permits burning of natural fallen vegetation only, meaning leaves and small limbs that fell from trees on your own property. The conditions attached to that are specific: burn between sunrise and sunset, keep the pile no larger than six feet by six feet, stay 50 feet from structures and property lines, keep an adult supervising it at all times, have it completely out before dark, and do not burn on windy days or when smoke is being trapped. A permit from the Hall County Fire Marshal is required.

That is a leaf pile. It is not a land clearing operation, and it is not a way to dispose of four hardwoods.

Rule two: some things can never be burned here at all

Hall County prohibits the burning of building materials, furniture, plastic, rubber, tires and garbage year-round. Not restricted, not permitted seasonally. Prohibited.

That closes the gap people try to use. A demolition pile with brush mixed into it is not a brush pile. If your yard debris has fence boards, deck lumber, an old shed wall or a couple of bags of household trash in it, the entire pile has left the category of anything legally burnable, in any month of the year.

Rule three: the state banned yard trimmings from municipal landfills

Georgia prohibits yard trimmings disposal at municipal solid waste landfills with liners and leachate collection systems, and at MSW landfills that received vertical expansions. The ban is at O.C.G.A. Section 12-8-40.2 and it took effect on 1 September 1996. It is not new, and it is not local policy.

The definition matters as much as the ban. O.C.G.A. Section 12-8-22(42) defines yard trimmings as leaves, brush, grass clippings, shrub and tree prunings, discarded Christmas trees, nursery and greenhouse vegetative residuals and similar landscaping materials. It expressly excludes land clearing debris such as trees and stumps.

Here is where people get tangled. A stump is technically not a yard trimming under that definition. That does not make it landfill material, because the Hall County landfill separately refuses yard debris including trees, stumps, leaves and grass clippings on its own terms. Two different rules, one outcome.

The statute also says what must happen instead. Yard trimmings are to be sorted and stockpiled, or chipped, or composted, or used as mulch, or otherwise beneficially reused or recycled to the extent feasible. The state did not merely ban a destination. It named the alternatives.

Rule four: nobody is coming to pick it up

Unincorporated Hall County has no residential curbside collection at all. What exists is 12 compactor sites plus the landfill, and County Code Sec. 8.60.290 specifically prohibits yard trimmings at the compactor sites. It also limits them to household garbage in bags of 39 gallons or less and excludes commercial haulers who charge for disposal.

Inside the City of Gainesville there is weekly collection that does include yard trimmings for residential customers, under Sec. 4-3-5. But read Sec. 4-3-9 before you rely on it. The city will not collect trees, bushes and vegetation brought by commercial tree trimmers, landscapers, grading contractors or building contractors, except under a special fee arrangement. If you hired somebody to take the trees down, their debris is not going out with your cart.

Four doors, one hallway

Four independent authorities, no coordination between them, and the same result from every direction. We did not write that argument. We just read it. The full rule-by-rule breakdown is in our article on Georgia disposal and recycling rules in Hall County.

So where can clean brush legally go?

The good news is that Georgia built the answer into the same rules. Yard trimmings are still allowed at inert waste landfills operating under permit by rule, and at private industry landfills accepting only their own waste.

An inert waste landfill is defined in Georgia's solid waste rules at 391-3-4-.07(4)(c) as a facility taking earth and earth-like products, concrete, cured asphalt, rock, bricks, yard trimmings, stumps, limbs and leaves. That is precisely the list a tree job produces. Beyond that, the statutory preference is chipping, composting and mulching, which is why chipper trucks follow tree crews around this county.

The whole thing turns on one word: clean. A container of nothing but limbs, brush, leaves and stumps is a legally different load from a container with a fence panel and two trash bags in it. Clean vegetation has a permitted destination. Mixed debris does not have that destination, and it has to be routed as ordinary construction and demolition or municipal waste instead.

That is the whole reason we ask you to keep loads separate

It is not tidiness and it is not upselling. Sorting at the container decides which class of permitted facility the load can go to, which decides what the disposal costs. One clean brush container plus one mixed container is routinely cheaper than one container with everything thrown in together, and it is the only version that is actually lawful.

Sizing a brush container

Green wood is heavy and it is inefficient. Limbs do not nest. A container full of unbroken brush is mostly air, and the volume disappears faster than anybody expects.

• Cut to length. Four to six foot pieces stack. Twelve foot limbs bridge across the box and waste a third of it.
• Load butts and tips alternating, the way firewood goes in a truck. Same volume, far more material.
• Stumps and root balls are dirt. A root ball comes with red clay in it, and clay is heavy. Stumps belong in a smaller box, not stacked on top of a full 30.
• Leaves and clippings are wet. A container of raked leaves after a rain weighs far more than it looks like it should.

The practical sizing: a 15 or 20 yard handles most storm cleanups and hedge or tree removals on a residential lot. A 30 makes sense for large-volume brush where the material is light and bulky. Go to a 10 when stumps, root balls or soil dominate, because that load will hit its weight limit long before it fills. There is more on how the sizes match up on the dumpster sizes page.

Storm weeks and ice storms

North Georgia's big vegetation events are not one thing. Wind and thunderstorm damage runs through the warm months. Ice is the winter version, and an ice storm in the Piedmont is a massive tree debris event, since a quarter inch of accretion on a mature hardwood is enough to bring limbs down across a whole county at once. Snow averages about 1.9 inches a year here, but ice does the actual damage. Decayed tropical systems reach this far inland too, and they arrive as rain and wind rather than anything coastal, since Hall County sits more than 250 miles from the Georgia coast.

Two practical consequences. First, the yard trimmings ban does not pause after a storm, so the pile at the curb still has to be sorted into a clean vegetation load and everything else. Second, after a widespread event, everybody in the county wants a container in the same week. Call early. There is more on that in our guide to storm and tornado debris cleanup in Gainesville. Forecast information for this area comes from NWS Peachtree City.

Land clearing is a different job

Clearing a lot is not a yard cleanup with more volume. It produces stumps, root balls, soil and rock, all of them heavy, and it usually involves excavation. Two things go with that.

Call Georgia 811 before anything goes in the ground. Georgia's one-call center is Georgia 811 and the law is the Georgia Underground Facility Protection Act at O.C.G.A. Title 25, Chapter 9. The notice window is two to eight business days, and the clock starts at 7 a.m. on the first business day after your request.

Expect to run more than one container. Soil and stumps in a 10, brush in a 20, and any structures or fencing in a third if there are any. That sounds like more equipment than it needs. It is usually less money, because each load goes where it legally belongs instead of all of it going to the most expensive available destination.

A short seasonal note

Two dates are worth writing down. On 1 May, legal burning stops for five months. On 1 October it resumes, but only for fallen leaves and small limbs, in a six by six pile, with a Fire Marshal permit. Building materials remain unburnable in every month.

One nice piece of the calendar: Hall County's recycling center accepts Christmas trees free through 6 January under the Bring One for the Chipper program, and the trees become mulch. That is exactly the beneficial reuse the state statute contemplates. The county publishes its solid waste and recycling information at Hall County.

If you have a pile and you are not sure which parts of it can travel together, call the office at (470) 691-8287 and describe it. We will tell you whether it is one container or two. What we handle and how we route it is on our yard waste removal page.