Dumpster Rental in Mead, CO

Roll-off containers for Mead homes and jobsites

Mead is a statutory town wholly inside Weld County. One town, one county, one permit desk, and a town that operates under state statute rather than its own home rule charter. That is the simple end of this market, and after the five straddle municipalities on this list it is a pleasant change to be able to say that a Mead address answers to exactly one county government.

We will be straight about a gap on this page, because it is a gap that matters. Mead Town Hall is at 441 Third Street, and we could not find a published phone number for it in anything we could reach. We are not going to invent one, and we are not going to reprint a number off an aggregator site that has never called it. The town’s own site is meadco.gov and that is where to start. If you find a current number and it saves you a step, good — and if you tell us what it is we will keep it on the desk here for the next caller.

Along with that: we could not verify whether Mead licenses haulers, requires a container or right-of-way permit, has a dumpster ordinance of its own, or which fire code edition its fire district enforces. The one ordinance quoted on this site is Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35, which governs Johnstown’s public property and nowhere else. A statutory town generally has less of its own regulatory machinery than a home rule town does, but that is a tendency rather than a rule and it is not a substitute for asking.

What we can tell you about Mead with confidence is the county layer, and it is the same in Mead as anywhere else in unincorporated Weld: the county adopts 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 this Building Code,” which is why the county’s 2024 code package, effective 15 June 2026, contains no fire code. On county ground, the fire protection district is the authority on placement, and district boundaries do not follow town boundaries. Weld County Public Works handles county right-of-way on (970) 400-4000.

The other Mead-specific thing on the ground is the interstate. CDOT’s I-25 North Express Lanes: Mead to Berthoud project starts here — roughly six miles from Colorado 66 in Mead north to just south of Colorado 56 in Berthoud, mileposts 243 to 250, one twelve-foot express lane each way plus widened shoulders, bridge replacements and reconstruction of the I-25 and Weld County Road 34 interchange, at about $415 million on a 2024 to 2028 schedule. The CDOT project hotline is 720-593-1996. We will not publish what is closed on any given morning, because that changes faster than a web page does. What we will do is take your delivery window seriously when you book, because the run down to Mead crosses the work.

Otherwise Mead jobs look like the rest of the corridor: hail-driven roofing in bursts, new-subdivision cleanup, basement finishes, rural property clears, and the deep digs that come with a 30-inch frost line.

What we know about working in Mead

What is settled everywhere, Mead included: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. A right-of-way permit regulates work in the public right-of-way, and your driveway is not that. On a public street inside the town, ask the town before you plan the placement. On a county road outside it, Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000 — and the honest framing there is that the county requires permits for construction activities within county rights-of-way and its language reaches occupation of them, but it does not name dumpsters. The language is broad; a call is warranted; we will not claim more than that.

The fire-code answer does not depend on the town or the county. Under the International Fire Code, a container may not be placed within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines — 2024 edition § 304.3.5 from 1.5 cubic yards, and § 304.3.4 from 1.0 cubic yard with an exception where the container is noncombustible. Every roll-off is far above both thresholds, so the five feet always applies, and the measurement runs from the eave line rather than the wall. That is the number we work to at every address on this site, and it is the number your fire district will give you as well.

Building code, with a jurisdiction attached, because Colorado has no statewide residential building code: Weld County’s 2024 package — IBC, IEBC, IRC, IMC, IPC, IFGC, IECC, IPMC, ISPSC and the 2023 NEC — is effective 15 June 2026, with no fire code among them. The county publishes a 30-inch frost line for both residential and commercial work, a 30 psf ground snow load, a 115 mph basic residential wind speed and seismic design category B. Larimer County, a few miles north and west, publishes 30 inches of frost as well but a different snow load method and a wind speed that varies by site — those are two counties applying different methods to nearly the same ground, and blending them is how people end up with a number that belongs to neither.

Thirty inches of frost is the figure that actually changes a container order. Footings, water services and sewer laterals all sit at least that deep here, so a lateral replacement, a footing repair or a foundation drain produces materially more spoil than a newcomer expects, and spoil is dense. That is a 10-yard loaded low and level conversation, not a 20-yard one. Before the digging, Colorado 811: at least two business days notice by statute, not counting the day of notice, under C.R.S. Title 9, Article 1.5, with Colorado 811 advising three; white-line the area first; marks valid while clearly visible but not beyond thirty calendar days from the due date. 811 or 800-922-1987. Setting a container is not excavation, so it needs no locate — and we do not make that call for you.

Disposal is the Weld route and it is a good one for a Mead address. Weld County provides no residential collection, but its Dacono household hazardous waste facility at 5500 Highway 52 is the closer of the two, open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 9 to 4, free to Weld County residents, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, nothing leaking, nothing in bags. The Greeley facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue runs Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5. Neither takes electronics or appliances. The number is (970) 400-2217. There is also a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address, redeemable at participating landfills with anything over the limit paid at the gate.

What is actually banned in Colorado is narrower than most people assume. Electronics, from every landfill in the state since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Waste tires, routed to tire facilities rather than landfills except as a documented last resort, with state registration required to transport ten or more. Beyond those two, the local operators’ own lists refuse refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners, lead-acid batteries, liquids, propane cylinders, mercury bulbs and hot ashes — but there is no Colorado yard-waste landfill ban, and the landfills here accept yard waste and tree branches. What a Colorado landfill takes is largely set in its own approved operating plan rather than by a statewide list. That is why our disposal page is written facility by facility, and why we ask what is going in before we quote.

• RegionWeld County
• Distance from our yardSouth of the yard down the interstate, at the bottom end of the corridor we run
• Main routesI-25 south and off at the Colorado 66 interchange
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Mead is at the south end of what we run, and the trip down the corridor crosses CDOT’s express lanes work, so we build a little more slack into a Mead delivery window than a Johnstown one. Once we are in town the approaches are ordinary. The original blocks have older geometry — narrower drives, closer trees, and overhead that a hoist needs better than twenty feet of clear air to work under. The newer subdivisions have generous widths and the usual new-street risks: base course that has not taken its final asphalt lift, fresh sod that ruts, decorative concrete that marks, and irrigation mains sitting shallow beside the drive. Out on the county roads it is the lane surface that decides everything, and gravel that carries a pickup year-round can rut badly under a loaded truck in a spring thaw. We carry plywood and we lay it down rather than argue about it afterward. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear overhead; a 30 or a 40 wants noticeably more of each. Two Front Range specifics: wind, because an empty open-top box is a sail and Weld publishes a 115 mph basic residential wind speed, and winter, because a driveway with ice on it changes where a loaded container can safely be picked up from. Call (970) 427-0341.

Routes we run: I-25 south and off at the Colorado 66 interchange, the frontage roads south when the express lanes work is slow, the Weld county road grid east of the interstate, Colorado 66 east and west through town, the county roads north toward Johnstown when the interstate backs up.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Mead

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. Mead makes that easier than most of this service area, and it is worth saying plainly: Mead is a statutory town lying wholly inside Weld County. One town, one county, one permit desk. That is not the normal case here. Five of the municipalities we serve — Johnstown, Windsor, Berthoud, Erie and Longmont — straddle a county line, and on those the answer to a permit question changes with the street. In Mead it does not. You can stop at two desks: the town for anything inside the town limits, and Weld County for anything outside them.

The status is not decoration either. 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. The home rule places are the ones most likely to have written their own hauler licensing, container ordinances and right-of-way permits — Johnstown, which is home rule, has done exactly that, and we quote its ordinance below because it is Johnstown’s and it is written down. We have not read Mead’s code, and we will not print a Mead rule, fee, tier or turnaround that we have not read. We could not find a phone number published on the Mead page we were able to reach, so we are not going to print one off a directory and call it the town’s. Start at meadco.gov. Be wary of anybody who answers that question for you without naming the section.

What does not change at a town line is everything above it and below it. I-25 is CDOT’s, and so is every US and state route through this market — US 34, Colorado 60, Colorado 56 and Colorado 66 among them — whichever municipality they run through. Outside the town limits the section-line grid belongs to Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. Nor does the statutory locate call change, nor Colorado’s disposal bans, nor the fact that Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county. And because Colorado has no statewide residential building code, every code sentence needs a jurisdiction attached: Weld County’s 2024 package takes effect 15 June 2026, Larimer County’s 1 January 2026, and what Mead has adopted on its own timetable we did not verify. Give us the address and we will tell you which owner you are dealing with before we load a truck.

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. Not the municipality’s and not the county’s. On your own driveway in Mead the constraints we know of are the fire clearance, your covenants, a landlord’s consent and whether the approach will carry a loaded truck, and the driveway is where we would rather set the box in any case.

If any part of it will sit in the street, the sidewalk or the verge, that is right-of-way, and inside an incorporated place the right-of-way belongs to the municipality rather than to the county. Mead runs its own permit counter, so ask there before the truck comes. We did not verify Mead’s ordinances, and we will not print a fee, a tier or a turnaround for Mead that we have not read. What we can show you is what the sequence looks like where it is written down. A few miles away, 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,” with placement in violation “considered a nuisance,” and § 11-23 requires a Town right-of-way permit for work of any kind in the public right-of-way. That is Johnstown’s ordinance and it stops at Johnstown’s town line. Different government, different paperwork, same truck. We could not find a phone number published on the Mead page we were able to reach, so we are not going to print one off a directory and call it the town’s. Start at meadco.gov. Outside the town limits the county is the desk: Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. And 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 Mead 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 Mead 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 Mead 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 Mead 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.

Collection in Mead is the town’s own business on its own limits. It is not Weld County’s and it is not Johnstown’s, and we are not going to publish Mead’s cart rules, bulky-item rules or collection day from memory. We could not find a phone number published on the Mead page we were able to reach, so we are not going to print one off a directory and call it the town’s. Start at meadco.gov. 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 municipal line the house sits on.

Underneath the town sits the county, and the county layer surprises people who have moved in from somewhere with a weekly truck. Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the 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. None of that is a curbside service and none of it takes job debris. Two things then travel with the load rather than with the address. The first is where it ends up, which is a facility permitted to receive that class of waste — a concrete tear-out and a roof tear-off do not go to the same gate. The second is what the load weighs, because disposal is charged by the ton, and that is why we ask what is going in the box before we quote it. Your side of that is telling us honestly whether the load is light and bulky or heavy and dense, since that is the difference between one haul and two. See the Colorado disposal and recycling rules for the rest.

Sizes we deliver to Mead