Dumpster Rental in Severance, CO

Roll-off containers for Severance homes and jobsites

Severance is a statutory town wholly inside Weld County, and both halves of that sentence do real work. Wholly inside one county means one set of county answers rather than two, which after Johnstown, Windsor and Berthoud is a genuine simplification. Statutory means the town operates under state statute rather than a home rule charter, which generally means less of its own regulatory apparatus than a home rule town would have — though generally is not always, and we did not verify Severance’s ordinances one way or the other.

That is the honest position on every place in this service area except Johnstown. We could not establish whether Severance licenses haulers, requires a container or right-of-way permit, has its own dumpster ordinance, or which fire code edition its fire district enforces. The one ordinance we quote on this site, Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35, is Johnstown’s rule for Johnstown’s public property. It does not travel to Severance and we would be doing you a disservice to imply otherwise. Ask the town before you plan a placement in a public street. For a container on your own driveway, no right-of-way permit is in play at all, anywhere, and that covers most of what we set.

The county answer, though, is one we can give with confidence, and it is the most useful thing on this page. Weld County adopts no fire code. The county’s own 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.” That is why the county’s adopted-codes list — 2024 IBC, IEBC, IRC, IMC, IPC, IFGC, IPMC, IECC, ISPSC and the 2023 NEC, effective 15 June 2026 — contains no fire code at all. So for a job on unincorporated Weld ground around Severance, a fire-code question goes to the fire protection district, not to the county switchboard. And district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries, so the district covering Johnstown and Milliken is not necessarily the district covering you. Find out which district you are in before you rely on a phone number.

Severance sits in the fast-growing band north of Windsor, on Weld County’s section-line road grid, and the work reflects it: new-construction cleanup, first remodels in newer subdivisions, and the ordinary rural mix of barn clears, outbuilding demolition, fence replacement and property cleanups on acreage. Weld County is the state’s agricultural heavyweight — ranked first in Colorado and eleventh in the United States for total agricultural sales at about $2.38 billion in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, with 545,480 cattle and calves — and that farm economy is the backdrop to a good share of the containers we set out this way.

The weather is the same as everywhere on this list: seven to nine hail days a year in the country’s most hail-prone corridor, chinook downslope windstorms, and a county that has recorded more tornadoes than any other in the United States, most of them short-lived landspouts forming along the Denver convergence zone. Watches and warnings come from NWS Denver/Boulder, not the western Colorado office, and it is worth having the right one bookmarked.

What we know about working in Severance

Three phone numbers cover almost every question a Severance job raises, and none of them is ours. The town, for anything touching a public street inside the town limits and for whatever local ordinance may exist that we could not read. Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000, for a right-of-way on a county road — the county requires permits for construction activities within county rights-of-way and its language covers occupation of them, but it does not name dumpsters, so the honest position is that the language is broad and a call is warranted rather than that a permit is definitely required. And the fire protection district, for anything about placement against a structure, because the county does not enforce a fire code.

The fire number itself is stable regardless of which district you are in: five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines. In the 2024 International Fire Code that is § 304.3.5 for containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more and § 304.3.4 at 1.0 cubic yard with an exception for noncombustible containers. Every roll-off is many times over both, so we work to five feet everywhere and measure from the eave rather than the wall. If your district has adopted a different edition, the five feet is the same in every edition we could read.

On the ground, a Severance job is often a rural job, and rural jobs have their own rules. Burning is not the free alternative people assume. Fire district amendments in this part of Weld County prohibit open burning when atmospheric conditions or local circumstances make it hazardous and require permits for the categories that are allowed at all. And burying it is not a shortcut: Weld County’s waste program states that a landowner disposing of waste on their own property must submit a design and operations report to the county and to the state for review and approval before doing so. Those two facts, both from the authorities themselves, are the real answer to “why not just push it into the draw.”

Disposal is the Weld route. The county provides no residential waste collection — its role is oversight, complaints, inspections and investigations. What it does provide is two household hazardous waste facilities: Greeley, 1311 North 17th Avenue, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5, and Dacono, 5500 Highway 52, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 9 to 4. Both are free to Weld County residents, which you are, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, nothing leaking, nothing in plastic bags, business waste by appointment and charged. Electronics and appliances are not accepted at either. The number is (970) 400-2217. There is also a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address — a truckload level with the bed rails or a trailer up to a ton, free at participating landfills, with anything over the limit paid at the gate.

What cannot go in the box, statewide: electronics, banned from Colorado landfills since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303 — and the landfills serving this area list electronic waste as prohibited on their own materials, so it is refused at the gate too. Waste tires: state rules say tires must go to a tire collection, processing or monofill route rather than to a landfill except as a documented last resort, and no person may transport ten or more waste tires without state registration, so a barn clear that turns up two dozen old implement tires is its own separate job. Also refused by the local operators: refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners with refrigerant, lead-acid batteries, liquids including paint and oil, propane cylinders, mercury bulbs and hot ashes. There is no Colorado yard-waste landfill ban and the landfills here accept yard waste and tree branches, though A-1 Organics composts on 970-454-3492. And cover the load: Front Range Landfill publishes that all incoming loads are subject to random inspection and that uncovered or unsecured loads will be charged double.

• RegionWeld County
• Distance from our yardNorth-northeast of the yard, up past Windsor into the Weld county road grid
• Main routesUS 34 east and north on the Weld county road grid
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Severance is a run north-northeast of the yard, up through or around Windsor and out onto the Weld county road grid. The section-line grid makes navigation easy and the surface makes it interesting. Inside the newer subdivisions the geometry is generous — wide drives, square aprons, plenty of overhead — and the risks are the ones that come with new streets: base course that has not taken a final lift, fresh sod, and irrigation mains sitting shallow beside the drive. In the older town blocks the drives are narrower and the trees are taller, and overhead becomes the constraint, since a hoist needs better than twenty feet of clear air to stand a box up off the rails. Out on the acreage the whole question is the lane. A quarter mile of gravel or dirt that carries a pickup all year will not necessarily carry a loaded roll-off truck out in a thaw or after a cloudburst, and a rutted lane stays rutted. We carry plywood, we use it, and we would much rather have that conversation on the phone than at your gate. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach and eleven feet of working width; a 30 wants more. Tell us the surface, the grade, the gate width and what the last hundred feet looks like when you call (970) 427-0341.

Routes we run: US 34 east and north on the Weld county road grid, Colorado 257 north through Windsor, Colorado 392 across the top and north into town, the county roads north from Windsor for the newer subdivisions, the interstate and across when the direct roads are slow.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Severance

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. Severance makes that easier than most of this service area, and it is worth saying plainly: Severance 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 Severance 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 Severance’s code, and we will not print a Severance rule, fee, tier or turnaround that we have not read. We do not have a phone number for Severance that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns is aggregator listings rather than the town’s own page — so go to the town clerk and ask there. 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 Severance 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 Severance 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. Severance runs its own permit counter, so ask there before the truck comes. We did not verify Severance’s ordinances, and we will not print a fee, a tier or a turnaround for Severance 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 do not have a phone number for Severance that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns is aggregator listings rather than the town’s own page — so go to the town clerk and ask there. 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 Severance 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 Severance 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 Severance 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 Severance 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 Severance 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 Severance’s cart rules, bulky-item rules or collection day from memory. We do not have a phone number for Severance that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns is aggregator listings rather than the town’s own page — so go to the town clerk and ask there. 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 Severance