Dumpster Rental in Berthoud, CO

Roll-off containers for Berthoud homes and jobsites

Berthoud is the odd one out among the straddle towns, and the difference is worth understanding before you call anybody. Johnstown, Windsor, Erie and Longmont are all home rule municipalities — they draw their powers from their own charters under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution and can legislate in local matters beyond what state statute prescribes. Berthoud is a statutory town. It operates under state statute rather than a home rule charter. In practice that means the home rule towns are the ones most likely to have written their own hauler licensing, their own container ordinances and their own right-of-way permit schemes, and statutory towns often have less of that machinery. It is a real distinction and it is the reason permit content on this site is written town by town rather than county-wide.

What it is not is a promise. A statutory town can still regulate its streets, and we did not find and read a Berthoud ordinance. We could not verify whether Berthoud licenses haulers, requires a container or right-of-way permit, has a dumpster ordinance of its own, or which fire code edition its district enforces. The ordinance we quote elsewhere on this site — Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35 — is Johnstown’s, and it stops at the Johnstown town line. Berthoud Town Hall is at 807 Mountain Avenue and the number is 970-532-2643. Ask them, or start at berthoud.org. We would rather hand you the right phone number than a confident guess.

Berthoud also sits in two counties: Larimer and Weld, with the bulk on the Larimer side. That matters the moment a job leaves the town limits. Larimer County Engineering is on (970) 498-5709 and quotes ten business days on its right-of-way, access and floodplain permits; its published permit material does not address containers at all, so we give you the number and claim nothing about what it covers. Weld County Public Works is on (970) 400-4000, and its right-of-way page covers occupation and construction within county rights-of-way in broad language but does not name dumpsters. Two counties, two desks, two different answers to the same question, and the address decides.

The other Berthoud-specific thing on the ground right now is the interstate. CDOT’s I-25 North Express Lanes: Mead to Berthoud project runs roughly six miles from Colorado 66 in Mead to just south of Colorado 56 in Berthoud, mileposts 243 to 250, adding one twelve-foot express lane in each direction along with widened shoulders and bridge replacements, at about $415 million and on a 2024 to 2028 schedule. The CDOT hotline is 720-593-1996. We will not tell you what is closed on any given morning, because that changes and we would be wrong by the time you read it — but if your delivery window is tight, say so when you book and we will build the run around it. See CDOT for current work.

Beyond that, Berthoud jobs look like the rest of this market. Hail drives roofing. The 30-inch frost line published by both counties drives dig volumes. Basements are ordinary here, which makes basement finishes, re-finishes and cleanouts a steady share of the work. And the growth in the corridor between Longmont and Loveland has put a lot of new houses on ground that was farmed within living memory.

What we know about working in Berthoud

The universally safe line first, because it covers most of what we do: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. No county right-of-way permit, no town right-of-way permit, nothing. What can still apply on private ground is a town ordinance about containers, a homeowners association covenant, a landlord’s consent, and the fire code. On the first of those, in Berthoud, we do not know, and 970-532-2643 is the number that does.

The fire code is the part we can answer without knowing the town. The separation in the International Fire Code is five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines — § 304.3.5 of the 2024 edition applies it to containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more, and the adjacent § 304.3.4 applies the same five feet from 1.0 cubic yard, with an exception where the container itself is noncombustible. Every roll-off is many times either threshold. Which edition Berthoud’s fire district has adopted we could not establish, and it is a real question here rather than a formality: Weld County adopts no fire code at all, and in its own ordinance says the fire code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code.” So on the Weld side of Berthoud, and on any unincorporated Weld ground, the fire authority is the district, not the county, and district lines do not follow town lines. Five feet is our working number everywhere because it is the number in every edition we could read.

Building code needs a jurisdiction named every time, because Colorado has no statewide residential building code. Larimer County’s 2024 package takes effect 1 January 2026; Weld County’s takes effect 15 June 2026; what the Town of Berthoud has adopted, on its own timetable, we did not verify. The number that actually reaches a container order is the 30-inch frost line, published by both counties. Footings, water services and sewer laterals sit at least thirty inches down here. A footing replacement, a sewer lateral or a foundation drain therefore produces a good deal more spoil than the same job in a mild climate, and soil is heavy. That is a 10-yard loaded low conversation, not a 20-yard one.

Disposal is where Southeastern habits go wrong and Berthoud is no exception. There is no Colorado yard-waste landfill ban. The landfills serving this area accept yard waste, and A-1 Organics composts on 970-454-3492 if you would rather route it that way. What is banned outright is electronics, from every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Tires are refused at the gate locally, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more waste tires. Beyond those, what a landfill takes is set facility by facility in its own approved operating plan rather than by a statewide list, which is exactly why we ask what is going in the box before we quote a job. Read the Colorado disposal and recycling rules for the full picture.

Two more things that come up on Berthoud calls. First, neither Larimer nor Weld County collects residential waste — anywhere, for anyone. Weld runs household hazardous waste facilities free to Weld residents and a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address; Larimer runs the Central Diversion & Transfer Station at 2388 W. Trilby Road in Fort Collins on 970-498-5772. A Berthoud household on the Larimer side cannot use the Weld facilities free, and that asymmetry catches people out. Second, if the house is old enough to matter: Colorado is not authorized by EPA for the lead Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA directly rather than with a state agency. And asbestos here is an air quality matter under CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B: in a single-family home the trigger is 32 square feet or 50 linear feet, notification runs ten working days, and any demolition requires notification regardless of size. Asbestos-containing material does not go in a rented container.

• RegionLarimer and Weld Counties
• Distance from our yardSouthwest of the yard, on the far side of the interstate from most of what we run
• Main routesI-25 south and west on Colorado 56 into town
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Berthoud is a longer run from the yard than most of what we do, and the interstate is both the route and the complication. We come south on I-25 and in on Colorado 56, or we drop onto the frontage roads when the express lanes work has the mainline slow. The town splits into two kinds of approach. In the older core around Mountain Avenue the lots and drives are narrow, mature trees hang over the pavement, and the constraint is nearly always overhead rather than width — a hoist wants better than twenty feet of clear air above the rails to stand a box up. In the newer subdivisions and out on the acreage the widths are generous and the problem moves to the surface: a long gravel drive that carries a pickup all winter will not necessarily carry a loaded roll-off truck back out in a spring thaw, and this is ground that gets soft when it gets wet even though it does not get wet often. Fifteen inches of precipitation a year does not mean the ground never softens; it means it softens rarely and unexpectedly. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach and eleven feet of working width. Send us a photo of the last hundred feet and we will tell you honestly whether it goes. And plan the pull: an empty box in a chinook wind is a sail, and the load wants a tarp before it moves. Call (970) 427-0341.

Routes we run: I-25 south and west on Colorado 56 into town, the frontage roads south when the interstate is under construction, the Larimer county roads west of the interstate, the Weld county road grid for the eastern portion of town, US 287 for anything on the far west side.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Berthoud

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. Around here that is harder than it sounds, because five of the municipalities we run to straddle a county line — Johnstown, Windsor, Berthoud, Erie and Longmont. One town government, two county governments underneath it. Berthoud is the odd one out among the five. It is a statutory town rather than a home rule one, and it sits in Larimer County and Weld County with the bulk of it on the Larimer side. Two addresses a mile apart can answer to two building departments, two road departments and two right-of-way desks, and the street address is the only thing that settles it. That is why we ask for one before we quote anything that touches a permit. It is not a hedge; in this market it is the single most useful thing anybody can tell you.

Inside the town limits the town is the government that matters. It runs the permit counter, it owns the streets — I-25 belongs to CDOT, and so does every US and state route through this market, whichever municipality they pass through — and any rule it has written about containers is its rule rather than the county’s. Underneath that sits a distinction Colorado takes seriously. A home rule municipality draws its powers from its own charter under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution and can legislate in local matters beyond what state statute prescribes; a statutory town works from state statute. Berthoud is a statutory town. In practice the home rule places are the ones most likely to have written their own hauler licensing, their own container ordinances and their own right-of-way permits, which is exactly why the permits content on this site is written town by town rather than county-wide.

Step outside the town limits and the county becomes the road authority and the building department, and here that means naming which one before you dial. On the Larimer side that is Larimer County Engineering on (970) 498-5709. On the Weld side it is Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. Building code needs the same treatment, because Colorado has no statewide residential building code — every jurisdiction adopts separately and on its own timetable. Weld County’s 2024 package takes effect 15 June 2026 and Larimer County’s 1 January 2026. Give us the address and we will tell you which owner you are dealing with before we load a truck, because on a straddle town a town name is not enough to go on.

Now the part most of our competitors skip. Start with the line that is safe everywhere: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. None, from the town or from either county. That covers the overwhelming majority of what we set in Berthoud. What can still apply on private ground is a town ordinance about containers, a homeowners association covenant, a landlord’s consent and the fire code — and of those, the fire code is the one with a number in it.

It is the street case that needs a phone call, and in a straddle town it needs the right one. A few miles up the corridor, Johnstown has written its rule down: Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35 provides that “no person shall place, store or maintain a dumpster on any public property unless expressly authorized in writing by the Town,” and placement in violation “is considered a nuisance.” That is Johnstown’s ordinance and it stops at Johnstown’s town line. It tells you nothing whatever about Berthoud. We could not verify whether Berthoud licenses haulers, requires a container or right-of-way permit, or has a dumpster ordinance of its own, and we are not going to assume Johnstown’s rules travel. Ask Berthoud directly on 970-532-2643. Start at berthoud.org. “We could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none,” and we would rather hand you the right phone number than a confident guess. If the job is outside the town limits, the county is the desk instead: on the Larimer side that is Larimer County Engineering on (970) 498-5709, and on the Weld side Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. An honest caveat on each. Weld County’s right-of-way material covers occupation of and construction within county rights-of-way in broad language but does not name dumpsters or containers, so the fair reading is that a call is warranted rather than that a permit is certainly required; and Larimer County’s published permit material does not address containers at all, in either direction — we give you the number and claim nothing about what it covers. Whether or not permission is involved, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled.

The driveway carries one rule of its own and it is a fire rule. There is no statewide fire code doing this job in Colorado, so the edition depends on who adopted it, and the one we can name is the 2024 International Fire Code as adopted by the Town of Johnstown. In that edition § 304.3.5 keeps dumpsters and containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more out of buildings and at least five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines, with no exception; the adjacent § 304.3.4 applies the same five feet from 1.0 cubic yard, with an exception where the container itself is noncombustible. Both sections exist and neither one is “the” threshold, which is where most of the copy on the internet goes wrong — along with a “ten feet from the building” rule of thumb that is nobody’s code at all. It does not matter here anyway: every roll-off we run is many times over both figures, so the answer never changes. Five feet, always, and it is measured from the eave line, not just from the wall. On a Berthoud lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard that is a real measurement, and we take it before the rails come off the truck. And note where you take that question out here. Weld County enforces no fire code at all — its ordinance says the International Fire Code shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under the county’s Building Code — so on unincorporated Weld ground the fire protection district is the authority, not the county, and district lines do not follow town lines. Front Range Fire Rescue takes placement questions for Johnstown and Milliken on 970-587-4464.

Last, the approach. To swing a box off the rails we want about 60 feet of straight, roughly 11 feet of working width and 20-plus feet of clear overhead. What fails that test in Berthoud is rarely the highway; it is almost always the last hundred feet. This is flat, irrigated high plains rather than mountain country — our own ground out at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet — so a truck here runs a section-line grid and a four-lane interstate instead of switchbacks, and the things that go wrong are different ones. In the newer subdivisions it is fresh sod, a shallow irrigation line beside the drive and a street still on base course without its final asphalt lift. On acreage it is a quarter mile of gravel lane that carries a pickup all year and ruts badly under a loaded truck in a spring thaw. In the older grids it is a low service drop and a mature shade tree over the only flat spot — a gap that looks wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you see.

Two more layers reach every job we run, and neither of them starts at a local counter. The first is what may lawfully go in the box. Solid waste in this state is CDPHE’s, under the solid waste regulations at 6 CCR 1007-2, and the structure is not the one people bring with them from the Southeast. A Colorado landfill is authorized by a Certificate of Designation issued by the county under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, with state review — a county instrument, and one that attaches to disposal facilities rather than to haulers. Beyond the statutory bans, what a landfill will take is set facility by facility in its own approved operating plan rather than by a statewide list, which is exactly why we ask what is going in the box before we quote a job instead of after.

The bans themselves are shorter than newcomers expect and they run the opposite way from the Southeast. Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban. The landfills serving this area accept yard waste and brush, and A-1 Organics composts green material on 970-454-3492 if you would rather route it that way. What is banned outright is electronics, kept out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303 — no televisions, monitors or computers in the container. Waste tires are refused at the gate by the local operators, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more, so tires never go in our boxes. Paint, solvents, fuel, automotive fluids, batteries, propane cylinders and pool chemicals stay out as well; those are a household hazardous waste run, not a container load.

Asbestos is the hard stop. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Colorado it is an air quality matter rather than a solid waste one, which surprises people: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division runs it under Regulation 8, Part B. In a single-family home the trigger is 32 square feet or 50 linear feet — far tighter than the federal commercial numbers — notification runs ten working days, the permit fee is published at $60 to $180, and a demolition requires notification regardless of size. The asbestos line is 720-507-5136. None of that is our filing to make, but all of it sits ahead of the container and we would rather book around it than deliver into a stop-work order.

The other date is 1978, which puts a job under the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule — and here Colorado is the opposite of most states people move from. Colorado is not authorized by EPA to run the RRP program, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA directly rather than with a state agency. How often that bites depends on where you are standing: in Johnstown, only about one home in ten predates 1980 and the median year built is 2007, so RRP is concentrated in the old core rather than spread across the market. Then, before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled, call Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987. The statute is C.R.S. Title 9, Article 1.5, and the notice period is two business days, not counting the day of notice. Be aware that Colorado 811’s own homepage says three business days while the statute and the site’s interior pages say two — give yourself the longer of the two and you are safe either way. White-line the dig area first. Setting a box on a driveway does not trigger the call; your project does — footings, fence posts, a stump, a sewer lateral. Our permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence in order.

The ground under Berthoud decides most of the rest, and almost every instinct carried in from a wetter market is wrong here. This is irrigated high plains: our own ground at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet, and precipitation across this market runs about 15.34 inches a year on the 1991–2020 normals at Greeley — roughly a third of what the Southeast gets. We are not going to tell you what the soil does underneath, because we did not establish it for this ground and it is not the sort of thing to guess at in print. What we will tell you is how the surface behaves under a truck, because that is what we deal with. A loaded 20 yard box is several tons carried on four small contact points. Dry, this ground takes it. Wet — after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a spring thaw — it ruts, and a quarter mile of lane that carries a pickup all year will not carry us. So the driveway is the surface and the lawn is not, plywood or timber mats go under every wheel and under both rails on every placement, all year round, and after a wet stretch we would rather move a date than tear up two hundred feet of drive.

The houses match the climate rather than the map. Basements are ordinary here, which changes a cleanout more than it changes a price: stairs mean hand-carrying, and a smaller box parked close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked out of the way. Both counties publish a 30-inch frost line, so footings, water services and sewer laterals sit at least that deep, and a trench that would be shallow somewhere warmer is a real excavation here. Spoil is the densest material that comes off a residential site, which is why a footing repair or a sewer lateral is a 10 yard loaded low conversation rather than a 20 yard one. The season starts later than newcomers plan for as well: the average last spring frost is around 12 May. One adjacent question comes up often enough while a house is open to be worth answering, and we will answer it the way EPA does rather than by naming a number off a map that gave us two different readings: “Homes with elevated levels of radon have been found in all three zones. All homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The vintage of the housing is the part that surprises people who know this corridor only from the interstate, and it cuts the work in two. In Johnstown, whose mailing address our yard uses, the median year built is 2007 and 71.8 percent of the housing went up in 2000 or later; only about one home in ten predates 1980, concentrated in the old Parish Avenue and Main Street core from the sugar and dairy era, where pre-1978 lead paint and older asbestos are live questions. Everywhere else the jobs are new-build cleanup, first remodels and hail roofs. The growth behind that is real and it is fast: Johnstown went from 17,303 people at the 2020 census to 22,433 by the 2025 estimate, a 29.5 percent gain that put it tenth in the nation for growth among places of 20,000 or more in 2024–25, with 528 single-family permits in 2025. Weld County as a whole went from 328,981 to 378,426 over the same five years. Those are Census numbers, and they are why new-construction cleanup is a steady service line here rather than an afterthought.

Then the weather, and here there is one hazard that matters more than all the others put together. Hail is the anchor job. This corridor takes seven to nine hail days a year and is the most hail-prone stretch of the United States. Roof tear-off is what this market buys containers for, and it does not arrive evenly — it arrives in bursts, in the week after a storm, when every roofer in the corridor calls on the same morning. If you have just been hit, call early; that is the honest advice. Wind is the second one. Chinook downslope windstorms come off the mountains hard enough that Front Range gusts have been recorded as high as 137 mph, and the design wind speed in Weld County is 115 mph. An empty container is a sail and a loose tarp is a kite, so we weight what we cover and we would rather set a box against a windbreak than out in the open. Weld County has more recorded tornadoes than any other county in the United States. Watches and warnings for both counties come from NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. An open container left uncovered through a heavy storm fills with water and grit, and that is weight you pay us to haul. Tarp it, or ask us for one.

Where all of it ends up is the local detail we like best, because the lawful routes out of a Berthoud project close one at a time and none of them close because we say so. Neither county collects residential waste, so there is no county truck to compare us with. A municipal cart, where a town provides one, is a cart on a schedule and is not built for shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete or framing lumber. Electronics may not go to a Colorado landfill at all. Tires are refused at the gate. And beyond the statutory bans, each landfill’s own approved operating plan decides the rest. The one place the Southeast’s habits genuinely do not transfer is green waste: Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban, so clean woody debris has more than one lawful route here — the landfills take it, and A-1 Organics composts it on 970-454-3492. Keep it in a load of its own and you keep that choice. Everything else rides to a permitted facility in one of our boxes, which is the argument for a container stated by somebody other than us.

What Berthoud does about household collection — whether it runs a program, contracts one out, licenses haulers or leaves it to the market — we did not verify, and we are not going to describe it from memory. Ask Berthoud directly on 970-532-2643. Start at berthoud.org. What we can tell you is that Johnstown, up the corridor, provides collection by contract under § 7-61(a), billed with the water bill under § 7-65(a) and not extended to multifamily buildings of three units or more or to commercial customers — which is Johnstown’s arrangement and nobody else’s. What is constant right across this market is the part that matters to us: no residential cart program anywhere here is built for construction and demolition debris. Shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete and framing lumber are ours to handle whichever side of a line the house sits on, and a cart is not a kitchen tear-out, a basement or a roof.

Underneath the town sits the county layer, and in a straddle town it is two layers rather than one. Neither Weld nor Larimer County collects residential waste anywhere in either county. What exists instead is drop-off: Weld County runs two household hazardous waste facilities — 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley and 5500 Highway 52 in Dacono — free to Weld County residents, capped at 200 pounds a visit, on (970) 400-2217, plus a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address; Larimer County runs the Central Diversion & Transfer Station at 2388 W. Trilby Road in Fort Collins, on 970-498-5772. Here is the catch that trips Berthoud households up: a household on the Larimer side is not a Weld County resident and cannot use the Weld facilities free or take the Weld voucher. Same town, two answers, and the address is what decides. Neither of those is a curbside service and neither of them takes job debris. That is the whole argument for a container out here, and it is not our argument — it is the governments’ own description of what they do and do not do. See the Colorado disposal and recycling rules for the rest of it.

Sizes we deliver to Berthoud