Greeley's Spring Clean-Up: What the City Will Not Take

Every spring in Greeley the same conversation happens in the same order. Somebody decides the garage has to be dealt with, or the bathroom finally gets gutted, or a rental has to be emptied before the first of June. Somebody else says: wait, the City does a clean-up, just take it there.

And for a car load of old furniture, that is exactly the right advice. The Greeley Annual Spring Clean-Up is a real, useful, cheap municipal service and you should use it when it fits. But its own published rules refuse, in the City’s words, precisely the material a remodel or a demolition produces — and it refuses bagged loads outright, which is how most cleanouts leave a house. This article is what the City actually says, and what to do about the part it will not take.

Nothing below is our characterization of a municipal program. It is the City of Greeley’s own published information about its own event, and the City’s Clean-Up line is 970-350-9336, Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., if you would rather hear it from them.

What the clean-up is

It is a two-day event held over a Friday and Saturday in early May, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., rain or shine, at a site the City describes as west of 14th Avenue and A Street. In 2026 it ran on Friday and Saturday, 8 and 9 May. Dates move from year to year, so call 970-350-9336 or check greeleyco.gov for the current year rather than trusting a date on anybody’s web page, including ours.

Two conditions are worth knowing before you load the truck:

• It is open to City of Greeley residents only. The City asks for “a valid photo ID confirming Greeley residency.”
• There is a charge: “$25 per carload/pickup or $35 per trailer. Cash, check, and credit card accepted.”

What it will take

The accepted list is short and specific: appliances, furniture, mattresses, scrap metal, and tires. With two published limits:

• Freon-containing appliances — refrigerators, air conditioners, freezers — are limited to one per household.
• Tires — a maximum of four tires under 20 inches, and “rims must be removed before drop-off.”

If your problem is an old couch, a dead washing machine, a mattress and a pile of scrap steel, stop reading and go to the clean-up. It is cheaper than anything we could offer you and it is the right answer.

What it will not take, in the City’s own words

Here is the sentence that matters most, quoted from the City’s own prohibited list:

“Construction or demolition debris (including dirt, concrete, masonry, plywood, and similar materials)”

Also prohibited: “Vehicles or vehicle-adjacent items (trailers, boats, campers, jet skis, non-running or off-road vehicles).”

And then the load rules, which catch far more people than the material rules do:

• “No household trash or bagged items. All materials must be fully visible.”
• “Vehicles with bagged loads will be turned away.”
• “No enclosed trailers or box trucks.”

Read that middle line twice, because it is the one that ruins Saturdays. Not bags will be removed. Not bags will be charged extra. Turned away. If you have spent a week filling contractor bags with the contents of a house — which is how every cleanout in history has been done — the event is closed to you in that form.

The jobs with no municipal route at all

Put the exclusion list together and a clear category emerges. The City’s own annual answer to “how do I get rid of this?” cannot take the output of:

• A bathroom gut — tile, mortar bed, cast iron tub, plaster, the vanity, the subfloor
• A roof tear-off — shingle, felt, sometimes two or three layers of it
• A deck or fence demolition — treated lumber, posts, concrete footings
• A garage slab or patio removal — concrete and masonry, named explicitly on the excluded list
• A basement finish or a basement demolition — framing, drywall, flooring, insulation
• Landscaping and grading work — dirt is on the excluded list by name
• A kitchen tear-out, a window replacement, a shed demolition, a ceiling texture removal

Those are not exotic jobs. In a city where the median home was built in 1985 and roughly 46 percent of the housing predates 1980, they are the ordinary work of an ordinary year. Roughly 29 percent of Greeley’s entire housing stock was built between 1960 and 1979 — houses now hitting sixty, on their second or third owner, needing the kitchen, the bathrooms, the roof and the sewer lateral doing.

So for a very large share of Greeley’s real renovation work, there is no municipal disposal route. That is not a criticism of the City. A two-day, residents-only, everything-must-be-visible event is not designed to absorb construction debris, and the City says so honestly on its own page. It just means the container is not a luxury for these jobs; it is the only route.

Where the City sends you for the rest

Credit where it is due: the clean-up notice itself points residents at the right alternatives, and they are genuinely good ones.

Household hazardous waste goes to Weld County’s facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue, Greeley — (970) 400-2217, open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and free to every Weld County resident. Paint, stain, solvents, thinners, pesticides, pool chemicals, motor oil, antifreeze and automotive fluids all go there and none of them go in a container. The published limits: 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in a container over five gallons, no leaking containers, no plastic bags. And note carefully — electronics and appliances are not accepted at that facility.

Green waste goes to the City’s own Greeley Organic Waste (GROW) Center — 970-673-3718. It takes grass clippings, leaves, plants, limbs and branches, Christmas trees, and clean wood: lumber that is unpainted and untreated.

Electronics go to Weld County e-waste collections, because electronic devices have been banned from Colorado landfills since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303.

The clean wood line is where most people trip

“Unpainted and untreated” is doing all the work in that GROW list, and it is worth being blunt about what falls outside it. Painted trim is not clean wood. Stained decking is not clean wood. Pressure-treated posts are not clean wood. Plywood, OSB and engineered sheet goods are not clean wood. Framing with nails in it is not clean wood.

Which means a demolition pile that looks like “just wood” to the person who created it is, materially, construction debris — excluded from the clean-up by name, and not a compost load either. A pile of storm-broken branches, by contrast, is straightforwardly green waste. Our yard waste and brush guide works through the line in more detail.

And it all happens in the same fortnight

Here is the part nobody plans for. Three separate calendars converge on the first two weeks of May in Greeley.

The frost lifts. Greeley’s average last spring frost is 12 May. Outdoor demolition, landscaping, concrete work and yard clearance do not really begin before then, so a season’s worth of intention starts moving at once.

The leases turn. The University of Northern Colorado’s academic year ends in early May. UNC enrolled 8,807 students in fall 2025 by its own count, in a city of about 115,073 that is 39.1 percent renter-occupied against 22.1 percent across Weld County. A year of accumulated furniture comes out of a lot of houses in the same week.

And the City opens the clean-up for two days. Residents only, photo ID, $25 a carload, nothing bagged.

That is the busiest fortnight of the Greeley year, and it is why a container booked a week in advance in early May is a different experience from one requested on the Friday morning. We are not going to put a number on move-out volumes, because nobody has measured them. We will say plainly that the shape of the year is real and the first half of May is the tight part of it. There is a second, smaller version of the same squeeze in mid-August when the leases turn again — the move-out and turnover guide covers that side.

What to do with what the City will not take

Practically, three routes cover almost everything.

Mixed renovation debris — drywall, plaster, framing, flooring, cabinetry, fixtures, insulation, trim — goes in a general container. A 15 or a 20 handles most single-room and whole-house work; our sizing guide explains why Greeley’s older housing makes the weight question sharper here. See also demolition debris.

Concrete, masonry and dirt — the material the City names on its excluded list — goes in a small dedicated box, kept clean and unmixed. That is the heavy debris job, and a 10-yard is almost always the right container.

Roof tear-off gets its own container and never a large one. Shingle is dense and reaches lawful payload long before it fills a big box — see roofing containers and the hail and tear-off guide. Northeastern Colorado averages seven to nine hail days a year and sits in the most hail-prone corridor in the country, so this is a routine Greeley job rather than a rare one.

For a whole-house clearance where bags are unavoidable, a container solves the bagging problem entirely: nothing has to be visible, nothing has to be unloaded twice, and nothing gets turned away at a gate. Junk removal and estate cleanout cover the assisted versions.

The rules that apply whichever route you choose

• The debris is the property’s responsibility. Greeley Municipal Code § 12-269(b): “All refuse and debris remaining as a result of the demolition or repair of any buildings or the erection and completion of any buildings shall be removed following substantial completion of the work.” An accumulation is a code infraction.
• A pile at the curb is not a plan. § 12-269(a) allows household trash containers on the public right-of-way for one 24-hour period in seven days. That is the weekly cart rule, not a license to stack a cleanout at the curb until May.
• Nobody else may fill your box. § 12-272 makes it a violation for anyone other than the person who placed a container to disturb it or its contents.
• An outdoor couch is legally refuse. § 20-974 defines refuse to include “upholstered furniture… used or stored outdoors in any unroofed area.”
• Five feet from anything combustible. The City adopted the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454, effective 1 January 2023, with no amendment to Section 304. Under Section 304.3 a dumpster must not be stored inside a building or placed within five feet of a combustible wall, and every roll-off is over the threshold. Fire Prevention: (970) 350-9510.
• Street placement needs a City permit. Public Space traffic permit and proper signage — Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881. See the permit guide.
• Cover the load. One of the landfills serving this region publishes that all uncovered or unsecured loads will be charged double, and Weld County’s published residential design wind is a 115 mph gust.

If you are not a Greeley resident

The clean-up is City of Greeley residents only, with photo ID. If you live in Evans, Garden City, Eaton, La Salle or anywhere else with its own government, this event is not yours to use, and we did not establish what those towns run instead — ask your own town. If you are in unincorporated Weld County — Lucerne, Galeton, Gill — there is no municipal program at all, and the county’s own desks are at 1150 O Street here in Greeley on (970) 400-4000. The household hazardous waste facility on 17th Avenue, however, is open to every Weld County resident, wherever in the county you live.

Use the clean-up. Then call us for the rest.

We are not competing with a two-day municipal event and we would not want to. Take the couch, the dead freezer, the scrap and the four tires to the City in May and pay your $25. Then, for the tile and the plaster and the shingle and the concrete and the bags — the material the City has told you in writing it will not take — call (970) 888-6911 and we will bring the right size box to your driveway.

More on materials in the Colorado disposal guide, on the desks in who do I actually call, and the rest on our FAQ page.