Yard Waste and Brush Removal in Northern Colorado

If you have moved here from a state with a yard-waste landfill ban, put that rule down. It does not apply in Colorado, and carrying it across will cost you time and money you do not need to spend.

We could not find a statewide Colorado landfill ban on yard waste, and the evidence runs the other way. Waste Management’s North Weld Landfill fact sheet lists yard waste among the materials it accepts. Front Range Landfill in Erie lists both yard waste and tree branches among accepted materials. Two permitted Colorado landfills advertising acceptance is not something that coexists with a statewide ban.

What we will not do is turn that into a flat slogan. The honest version is this: Colorado does not have a statewide landfill ban on yard waste, and the landfills serving this area accept it — but composting is widely available, and some haulers and some towns route green waste separately anyway. Weld County alone has three permitted composting facilities. A-1 Organics operates two of them and can be reached at 970-454-3492.

So the question here is not “am I allowed to?” It is “what is this actually going to weigh?”

The real constraint: green waste is heavy, and soil is worse

Every roll-off has a lawful road payload as well as a volume. Yard debris is where people discover that in the least convenient way, because a container full of brush looks like nothing and a container half full of sod is already at the limit.

Roughly in order of density, lightest first:

• Leaves, dry brush, small prunings — genuinely light. Volume is the constraint. Cut long limbs down; air is the expensive part.
• Green limbs and freshly cut branches — considerably heavier than they look, because they are still full of water.
• Trunk sections and rounds — heavy, and awkward to distribute in a box.
• Sod — heavy, and it comes with soil attached. This is the classic overweight load in this trade.
• Stumps and root balls — the worst of both. A root ball is mostly dirt held together by roots. Shake and knock off what you can before it goes in.
• Soil, rock and decorative gravel — the densest thing we haul, full stop.

Practical rule: if soil, sod, rock or stumps are going in, we bring a small box. A 10-yard of dirt outweighs a 30-yard of brush. Nobody believes that until they see the ticket.

For a pure brush and prunings job, a 15-yard or a 20-yard is usually right. For a full landscape tear-out with sod and rock, plan on a 10 with a second pull, or two 10s, and see concrete and heavy debris if there is any hardscape in it. The full arithmetic is in our sizing guide, and the service page is yard waste removal.

The season here starts later than you think

This is the single most useful scheduling fact in local yard work, and newcomers get it wrong every spring.

The average last spring frost near Greeley is 12 May. The average first fall frost is around 8 October. That is roughly a 149-day growing season.

What follows from that:

• March is optimistic for spring cleanup. A cleanup page written for a milder climate will tell you to start in March. Here, you will be working frozen ground, and anything you plant will get hit.
• May is the real start. That is also when everybody else starts, so book ahead.
• Fall cleanup is compressed. Between the first hard frost in early October and the first real snow, the window is short and the whole county is in it at once.
• Winter is prune-and-haul season for woody material, and the driveway needs clearing and sanding before a truck comes up it.

Where the brush comes from around here

This is irrigated farm and subdivision country at 4,938 feet, on flat high plains between two rivers. It is not forest, and we are not going to hand you forestry guidance written for the mountains, because it does not describe this ground.

What actually generates woody debris on this corridor:

• Wind. Downslope chinook windstorms are a documented Front Range hazard, with NOAA-recorded Front Range gusts as high as 137 mph in the January 1982 event. A winter chinook takes down limbs from mature cottonwoods, elms and ashes that have been standing in shelterbelts and yards for decades.
• Hail. Seven to nine hail days a year in the most hail-prone corridor in the country strips foliage, shreds ornamentals and finishes off vegetable gardens in ten minutes.
• Shelterbelt and windbreak maintenance on farm ground — the rows of trees planted to hold the wind off buildings and fields, which need thinning and eventually replacing.
• Irrigation ditch and fence line clearing, which produces a mix of brush, old wire, posts and general junk.
• Landscape conversion. In a market that gets about fifteen inches of precipitation a year, a lot of people are replacing turf with low-water planting. That job produces sod, soil and old rock, all of which are dense.

Burning is not the easy alternative it looks like

The old farm-country answer to a brush pile is to burn it. Two things to know before you do.

Open burning is regulated by your fire protection district, not by the county. Unincorporated Weld County enforces no fire code of its own — the county’s building ordinance provides that the International Fire Code applies only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under the county building code. The district is the authority. For Johnstown and Milliken that is Front Range Fire Rescue, 970-587-4464, frfr.colorado.gov, whose adopted amendments deal directly with prohibited open burning, burn permits and bonfires. Different address, possibly a different district and a different answer — district boundaries do not follow town or county lines.

And burying it is not a workaround. Weld County’s waste program states that a landowner disposing of their own waste on their own property must submit a design and operations report to the county and to CDPHE for review and approval before doing so.

A container is the boring answer, and it is the one that does not require a permit or a favorable wind.

Composting, and when it is the better route

There is a lot of composting capacity around here for a state with no yard-waste ban, and that tells you something: for clean green material, composting is a real and well-established route in Northern Colorado rather than a novelty.

Clean green — grass, leaves, prunings, clean brush with no wire, no plastic, no treated lumber — is the material composters want. A-1 Organics operates composting facilities in Weld County and can be reached at 970-454-3492. Larimer County residents also have the Central Diversion and Transfer Station, 2388 W. Trilby Road, Fort Collins, (970) 498-5772, and Kelim is a Larimer County address even though the mail says Johnstown — see our county line guide.

Where a container beats composting is when the load is mixed: brush plus old fence, plus a shed panel, plus a broken planter, plus the remains of a swing set. Mixed loads are not compost feedstock, and separating a mixed pile in a driveway costs more labor than the disposal saves.

What must not go in with the yard waste

Yard jobs quietly accumulate things that are not yard waste, and three of them matter.

• Tires. The landfills serving this area refuse them outright, and Colorado’s waste tire rules require state registration to transport ten or more. Tires turn up in fence rows and behind sheds constantly. They are a separate errand.
• Electronics. Banned from Colorado landfills since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. The garage-clearing half of a yard project produces them.
• Pesticides, herbicides, fuel, oil and pool chemicals. Household hazardous waste. Weld County residents have two free facilities — 1311 North 17th Avenue, Greeley (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and 5500 Highway 52, Dacono (Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.), (970) 400-2217 — with limits of 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in containers over five gallons, no leaking containers and nothing in plastic bags. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there.

Treated lumber, old fencing, wire, posts and landscape fabric are fine in a container but are not compostable, which is the practical reason a fence-line job is a container job. More detail in our Colorado disposal rules guide.

Placement, and the things under a lawn

Two local wrinkles worth a sentence each.

Sprinkler heads, drip lines and valve boxes. This is irrigated country and nearly every yard here has a system. They are invisible from a truck cab and they are the most commonly damaged thing on a delivery. Flag them, and turn the system off the day before — a watered lawn is a much softer surface for a loaded truck.

Digging is a Colorado 811 job. Removing a stump, setting new fence posts, trenching for irrigation or planting anything with a real hole under it counts. Colorado law requires at least two business days’ notice, not counting the day you call — C.R.S. Title 9, Article 1.5 — and Colorado 811 advises allowing three as a margin. White-line the area first with paint, flags or stakes, then call 811 or 800-922-1987. colorado811.org. It matters more here than most places: Weld County produces more than 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas, and rural properties on either side of the line may have flowlines and gathering lines crossing them that nobody has mentioned to the current owner.

Placing the container itself is not excavation and needs no locate. On a driveway, a yard or a private lot, no right-of-way permit is in play at all. If the box has to sit on public property inside the Town of Johnstown, § 7-35 is explicit — no dumpster on any public property without the Town’s express written authorization — and § 11-23 requires a Town right-of-way permit for work in the right-of-way. Town Hall: 970-587-4664. Outside town, Weld Public Works (970) 400-4000, Larimer Engineering (970) 498-5709. See the permits guide.

And five feet, always, from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines — the 2024 International Fire Code as adopted by the Town of Johnstown, § 304.3.5 at 1.5 cubic yards and § 304.3.4 at 1.0 cubic yard with a noncombustible exception. Every roll-off exceeds both.

We put plywood under the wheels and the rails; the driveway protection guide covers the rest, including why spring ground is the softest ground of the year.

Loading a green load properly

1. Cut to length. Limbs longer than the box lever the load and waste enormous volume. Cut to fit before the first piece goes in.
2. Heavy low and spread out. Rounds and stumps along the floor, not stacked at the door end.
3. Shake the dirt off root balls before they go in. That soil is payload you do not need to haul.
4. Stay under the rails. A load above the top rail cannot be legally hauled and cannot be covered.
5. Cover it. Leaves and light brush leave an open container in a gusty afternoon, and Front Range Landfill publishes that all incoming loads are subject to random inspection and that uncovered or unsecured loads will be charged double.

The summary

No Colorado yard-waste ban. Composting available and worth using for clean green. Heavy is the constraint, not legality. Season starts in May, not March. Burning is the fire district’s call, not the county’s. And soil, sod, rock and stumps go in a small box, always.

Tell us what is in the pile — brush, sod, stumps, fence, or all four — and we will bring the right size the first time. We have been running containers out of our yard on the Kelim frontage road since 2013. Call HJP Dumpster Rental at (970) 427-0341. Yard waste removal · sizes · service areas · FAQ.