Dumpster Rental in Lucerne, CO

Roll-off containers for Lucerne homes and jobsites

Lucerne is the clearest illustration in this whole service area of what a city boundary actually decides, and the reason is simply how close it is. It is under four miles from our yard in a straight line — and in that short distance you go from a fully governed home rule city with seven fire stations to territory with no municipal government whatsoever.

Lucerne is an unincorporated community in Weld County. It appears by name on Weld County’s own official list of its unincorporated towns, alongside Barnesville, Briggsdale, Buckingham, Camfield, Carr, Cornish, Dover, Galeton, Gill, Gowanda, Hardin, Hereford, Keota, Kuner, Purcell, Puritan, Roggen, Stoneham, Vollmar and Wattenburg. That is the county’s own list, not ours.

So none of the Greeley content on this site applies to you, and that is worth stating precisely because the rest of the site quotes so much of it. The City of Greeley licenses refuse haulers at § 8-368, declares itself the sole agency for refuse collection through city-licensed operators at § 8-371, names dumpsters directly in its Public Space permitting rules, adopts the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454 and the 2021 building and residential codes, runs its own fire department and answers on one number. Every word of that is real and every word of it is City of Greeley machinery. It ends at the city limits. Out here there is no council, no clerk, no municipal code, no municipal permit counter and no municipal collection service — and therefore no town ordinance about containers to check.

Which mostly works in your favor. The chain of authority out here is shorter than it is in the city: the county, the fire protection district, and whatever attaches to your own land. Most of the questions people ask us have a one-sentence answer on unincorporated ground, and the answer is usually that on your own property nothing is in play at all.

Two county facts govern nearly everything, and the second one surprises people every time. First, Weld County provides no residential waste collection, anywhere in the county. There is no county truck at the end of your lane and there never was one; you subscribe privately, haul it yourself, or rent a container. Second, Weld County adopts no fire code at all — the county’s own ordinance states that the provisions of the International Fire Code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code.” So on unincorporated ground the fire protection district is the fire authority, not the county. If somebody tells you to call the county about a fire code question out here, they are sending you to the wrong desk. And district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries, so find out which district covers your section before you rely on a number.

What we know about working in Lucerne

The placement question out here reduces to two cases, and one of them is nearly all of the work.

On your own property — driveway, yard, farmyard, lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. There is no municipality to permit or to object, and a right-of-way permit is about the public right-of-way. That is the great majority of what we set on unincorporated ground.

In a county road, call Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. Here is the honest version of that answer: the county requires permits for construction activities within county rights-of-way, including gravel roads and public drainage easements, and its language reaches the occupation of a right-of-way — but the county’s material does not name dumpsters or containers. That is the difference between here and the city, where the City of Greeley names dumpsters explicitly in its own permitting document. So the position is that the county’s language is broad enough to warrant a call, not that a permit is definitely required. Make the call. The county offices are at 1150 O Street in Greeley, which is where all of it lives — administration, the building department, the right-of-way desk, and Planning and Development Services on (970) 400-6100. If you want the hauler-licensing question answered at county level, that is the number, and we could not establish whether unincorporated Weld licenses or franchises haulers; we will not claim it does or does not.

Fire. Five feet from combustible walls, whichever district you are in and whichever edition it has adopted. We are not naming an edition for your section because the county adopts none and we did not establish which district covers you. What does not vary is the number: the container separation is five feet in every International Fire Code edition in use in this region, and every roll-off is far past the smallest capacity threshold involved. On a farm building with a deep eave, or an open-sided implement shed, measure from the nearest combustible surface rather than the wall — it puts the box further out than people expect, and we take that measurement before the rails come off.

What comes out of a rural clear, and what cannot go in the box. Waste tires: Colorado routes them to a collection facility, processor or monofill rather than a landfill, the local facilities refuse them at the gate, and no person may transport ten or more waste tires without state registration — old implement tires are their own job, arranged separately. Electronics: banned from every Colorado landfill since 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, and not accepted at the county household hazardous waste facility either, so they need a dedicated recycler. Also out: lead-acid batteries, refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners with refrigerant, all liquids including paint, oil and chemicals, propane cylinders, mercury bulbs and hot ashes. Old paint, fuel, solvent and agricultural chemical go to Weld County’s household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley — free to every Weld County resident, which out here you are — Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, nothing leaking, nothing in plastic bags. And note that the Greeley Annual Spring Clean-Up is City of Greeley residents only, with photo ID. Four miles out, you do not qualify.

Two things people ask about that we will not answer. Burning: open burning is regulated by the fire district out here, not by us, and we did not establish which district covers your section or what it permits. Ask them before you light anything. And burying: Weld County requires a landowner disposing of waste on their own property to submit a design and operations report to the county and to the state for review and approval first. That is the county’s rule, not our sales pitch, and between those two a container is usually the practical answer.

Finally, digging. Colorado 811 requires at least two business days’ notice by statute under C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103, not counting the day of notice, with the area white-lined first; CO811 itself advises three. Weld County produces more than 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas and gathering lines cross rural property routinely, often without the current owner knowing. 811 or 800-922-1987. Setting a container is not excavation and needs no locate, and we do not make that call for you.

• RegionWeld County
• Distance from our yardUnincorporated ground north of the Greeley city limits, under four miles from the yard in a straight line
• Main routesUS 85 north from Greeley up the corridor
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Lucerne is a short run for us — north out of the city on the corridor or up the section grid — and finding an address is easy, because the county roads run on the section lines and the numbering follows them. The lane at the end is where the delivery is decided. Out here the surface is the whole conversation: gravel or dirt that carries a pickup and a stock trailer all year will not necessarily carry a loaded roll-off truck back out in a spring thaw or after one of the cloudbursts this country gets instead of steady rain. A rutted lane stays rutted, and nobody enjoys that conversation afterwards. We carry plywood and lay it under the wheels as a matter of course. For a farmyard set we want a straight pull-out, ground firm enough to take the point load of the rails under a loaded box, clearance from low barn eaves and from the overhead power running to the shop, and a spot the crew can reach without carrying debris around a corner. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach and about eleven feet of working width; a 30 wants noticeably more of both, plus better than twenty feet of clear overhead. This is open country and the wind is real, so loads stay level with the rails and covered. Tell us the gate width, the lane surface, the grade and what is overhead. (970) 888-6911.

Routes we run: US 85 north from Greeley up the corridor, the Weld county road grid on the sections either side of the highway, 8th Avenue and the north Greeley avenues heading out of the city, the section-line roads east across the county, the corridor north toward Eaton and Ault.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Lucerne

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. In Lucerne the answer is the shortest one on this site: there is no municipality here at all. Lucerne is an unincorporated community in Weld County, and it appears by name on Weld County’s own official list of its unincorporated communities — the county’s list, not ours. No council, no clerk, no municipal code, no permit counter and no municipal collection, because there is no town to run any of it. What is left is three things: the county, the fire protection district, and whatever attaches to your own land. That is a shorter chain than a city address has to work through, and mostly it works in your favor.

It is worth seeing the size of the contrast, because it is small on a map and large on paper. Under four miles from here in a straight line — measured on the map, not on the road — the City of Greeley licenses refuse haulers at § 8-368, names dumpsters in its own Public Space permitting rules, adopts the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454 and runs seven fire stations of its own. Out here none of that exists, and that is not a complaint about Lucerne; it is simply the difference between incorporated and unincorporated ground. Cross the city limit and the building code edition changes too: Weld County moved to the 2024 I-Codes with effect from 15 June 2026, while Greeley has been on the 2021 editions since 1 January 2023. The county building department, the county right-of-way desk and county planning are all at 1150 O Street in Greeley — (970) 400-4000, planning (970) 400-6100 — so the paperwork for unincorporated ground is still sorted in the city, which is what being the county seat means in practice.

Then the fact that reshapes every fire question out here, and a national competitor will never get it right. Weld County adopts no fire code at all. The county’s own ordinance provides that the International Fire Code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code.” So on unincorporated Weld ground the fire protection district is the fire authority, not the county, and district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. Anyone who sends you to the county switchboard with a fire-code question out here is sending you to the wrong desk. Which district covers a Lucerne address, and which edition it has adopted, we did not establish and we will not name one on a guess — find out which district you are actually in before you rely on any answer, including ours. What does not vary is the number, and we come back to it below: five feet.

Now the part most of our competitors skip. With no municipality in the picture the placement question reduces to two cases, and the first covers nearly every job out here. On your own property — driveway, yard, farmyard, lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. There is no town to permit or to object, and there is no Lucerne permit desk, because there is no town. What remains on private ground is the fire district, your covenants or a landlord’s consent, and whether the lane will carry a loaded truck.

The second case is a container that has to sit in a county road or the ditch line, and that is a call to the county before the truck comes rather than after. Here is the honest version of the answer. Weld County requires permits for construction activity within county rights-of-way, including gravel roads and public drainage easements, and its language reaches the occupation of a right-of-way — but the county’s material does not name dumpsters or roll-off containers at all. That is exactly the difference between out here and the city, where Greeley names dumpsters in a published sentence. So the honest position is that the county’s language is broad enough to warrant a call, not that a permit is certainly required. Make the call: Weld County Public Works, at 1150 O Street in Greeley, on (970) 400-4000. On the hauler question, the county’s waste page refers you to Planning and Development Services on (970) 400-6100; whether unincorporated Weld licenses or franchises haulers we could not establish, and we will not claim that it does or that it does not. “We could not find one” is not “there is none.” Either way, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled.

One rule belongs to the driveway itself, and it is a fire rule. Section 304.3 of the International Fire Code provides that a dumpster must not be stored inside a building and must not be placed within five feet of a combustible wall. There is a threshold in that section expressed in cubic yards, and it does not matter here: every roll-off we run is far over it — even a 10 yard is ten cubic yards — so the five-foot rule applies to all of them, always. The debate you will find on the internet about which subsection and which capacity is academic; say five feet and stop. Measure it from the nearest combustible surface rather than from the wall plane, because on a Lucerne lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard the eave line is what actually decides where the box can sit, and we take that measurement before the rails come off the truck. Two more rules from the same section are worth having on a working site: containers over forty gallons need lids, and materials liable to spontaneous ignition — oily rags, stain and sealant-soaked cloths — belong in a listed disposal container rather than loose in a roll-off. That is a real jobsite fire cause, not a paper rule. And note where that question goes out here, because it is not where people expect. Weld adopts no fire code whatsoever — the county ordinance provides that the International Fire Code applies only where a local fire district has adopted it, and that it is not enforced under the county Building Code. Out on unincorporated ground, therefore, the fire authority is the protection district and not the county, and the district lines are not the town lines. Which district covers you we did not establish, and we are not going to name one on a guess. Five feet is the number regardless of who is enforcing it.

Last, the run in. Getting a box off the rails cleanly wants roughly 60 feet of straight, about 11 feet of width and 20-plus feet of nothing overhead. In Lucerne what fails that test is hardly ever the road. It is the final hundred feet of it. Nothing in this county is mountain driving — Greeley stands at 4,676 feet where the Cache la Poudre joins the South Platte, and a truck works a numbered grid in town and a section-line grid outside it — so the obstacles are small, local and entirely predictable once somebody has looked. On the old platted blocks: a service drop slung low over the only way in, a shade tree that has had sixty years to spread, a lot too narrow to swing on, an alley wanting the carts moved and the gate unlocked before we arrive. On the newer western ground: turf laid last month, an irrigation line run shallow alongside the drive, a street sitting on base course and waiting for its top lift. Out on acreage: a quarter mile of lane that has carried a pickup all winter and will cut up under nine tons in April. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you found.

Two questions follow the load rather than the address, and neither is settled at a town hall. The first is what the box is allowed to carry. CDPHE writes the solid waste rules at 6 CCR 1007-2, but the instrument that lets a disposal site exist at all is a county one: a certificate of designation under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, issued by the governing body with jurisdiction and reviewed by the state. Here that governing body is Weld, and the building it works out of is 1150 O Street in Greeley. Past a short list of statutory bans there is no master schedule of refused materials in this state — every facility writes its own into an approved operating plan. Which is why we ask what is going in the box while we are quoting it, rather than finding out when the ticket comes back.

The bans are brief and two of them trip people up. Electronics have been shut out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, so a television, a monitor or a tower needs a recycler — and the county hazardous waste counter will not take them either, which is the surprise we field most often. Waste tires are refused at the gate, and moving ten or more of them takes a state registration, so they never travel with us. Green material runs the opposite way: Colorado has never put a statewide landfill ban on yard waste, and the gates serving this county list branches and vegetation among what they accept. We still keep it in its own load, for money rather than law. The City’s GROW Center on 970-673-3718 takes grass, leaves, plants, limbs, branches and untreated lumber, though anything painted, stained or nailed together stopped being clean wood the day it went up, and A-1 Organics composts at Eaton on 970-454-3492. Everything wet or reactive — paint, solvent, fuel, automotive fluid, a battery, a propane cylinder, pool chemicals — has somewhere free to go three days a week at 1311 North 17th Avenue here in Greeley, on (970) 400-2217.

Asbestos is where we stop, and there is no version of the job where we do not. Nothing containing it rides in one of our containers. Colorado files it under air quality rather than waste, which catches out anyone who has worked in another state: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division administers it under Regulation 8, Part B. On a single-family house the thresholds are 50 linear feet of pipe covering, 32 square feet of anything else, or a 55-gallon drum by volume; a certified inspector goes in first; the notice period is ten working days; the published fees are $60 for a notice and $180 for a thirty-day permit; and a demolition has to be notified whatever the quantity turns out to be. Anything built after 12 October 1988 is exempt where the documentation shows no asbestos-containing material was used. The line is 720-507-5136. None of that is ours to file — but every bit of it sits in front of the container, and a job halted by an inspector costs a great deal more than a week of waiting for one.

The other year to know is 1978, the cut-off for the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, and Colorado handles it backwards compared with most of the country: the state never took the program over, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA itself. Whether that matters at all depends on where you are standing, and standing here it matters constantly, because close to half of Greeley predates the rule. The median house went up in 1985, roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980, and 7.2 percent of it was already standing in 1939. That is the reason our guide to lead and asbestos in older Greeley homes sits on the front page of this site instead of at the bottom of it. One last item, and it is the one people skip. Ring Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987 before a shovel goes anywhere. C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103 puts the notice at two business days, not counting the day you give it; Colorado 811 asks for three; take the three and you cannot be caught short. Mark the dig in white before you call. Setting a box on a driveway triggers none of this. A footing, a fence line, a stump or a sewer lateral triggers all of it.

What the box stands on settles more arguments in Lucerne than what size it is, and nearly every habit carried in from a rainier part of the country is the wrong habit here. Greeley sits at 4,676 feet on flat irrigated plain, and the 1991–2020 normal at Greeley–Weld County Airport — our own station, not a borrowed one from down the range — is 15.34 inches of precipitation in a year. What happens below the surface at your particular address is not something we will publish. That takes a geotechnical investigation, and guessing at it in print helps nobody. What is public, regional and genuinely useful is that the Colorado Geological Survey maps a potentially swelling-clay corridor running from Fort Collins and Greeley in the north to Pueblo and Cañon City in the south, with this city at the northern end of it, and clays of that sort can take up a great deal of water. The part we actually work with is the top few inches. Several tons ride on four small pads under a loaded container. Dry, this ground carries them without complaint. Come back after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a thaw and it will take an impression and keep it. Hence the one rule we never bend: concrete rather than turf, mats under every wheel and both rails, on every drop, in every month of the year — and after a wet week we would sooner move a date than cut up two hundred feet of somebody’s drive.

The houses were built for that climate, and they have a floor below grade. Table R301.2(1) of the residential code Greeley adopted publishes a 30-inch frost line, and the county publishes the same number, so footings, water services and sewer laterals all begin below it. A trench that would be trivial in a warm state is a real excavation here, and trench spoil is the heaviest material that comes off a house. That makes a footing repair or a lateral replacement a 10 yard loaded low conversation and never a 20 yard one. Where it changes a cleanout is the stairs, because hand-carrying is the job: a smaller box set close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked wherever suited the truck. Two dates belong in the same breath, since they decide when outdoor work can start at all — the average last spring frost is 12 May and the first fall frost is 8 October. And because it comes up whenever a lower level is opened up: on radon we quote EPA rather than a map, and EPA’s position is that elevated readings have turned up in every zone it draws, so “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The age of the housing splits this market in half, and it is the half nobody expects who knows northern Colorado only from the newer corridor towns. The median Greeley home dates from 1985. Roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980 and 7.2 percent of it was standing before 1940, while 39.1 percent of households here rent, against 22.1 percent across the county. So: an old city sitting inside the fastest-growing county in the state. 115,073 people on 49.09 square miles, incorporated 15 November 1885 out of the 1870 Union Colony, at the middle of a Weld County of 378,426 that turns out over 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas and $2.38 billion of agricultural product a year. Those figures are Census. Translated into containers it means two different loads on the same street: one is plaster, cast iron, pre-1978 paint and a third covering of shingle, the other is new-build tidy-up and a first remodel. The older one weighs considerably more, and it is the one we get called for.

Then the weather, where one hazard outranks the rest of the list put together. Hail is what pays for containers in this county. Northeastern Colorado runs seven to nine hail days a year inside the most hail-prone corridor in the United States, and the work never spreads itself out. It lands in one week, after one storm, with every roofer in Weld dialing the same numbers before eight in the morning. If your roof has just been hit, book it that day — and know that on a Greeley roof there is a sizing consequence attached, because a second course of asphalt still on the deck reaches lawful payload while the box still looks part used. Wind is second, and it is the one that damages property. Chinook downslope events come off the range hard enough to have produced recorded Front Range gusts of 137 mph, and the county publishes a residential design wind of 115 mph. A county does not write a figure like that down for decoration. An empty box walks, a heaped one redistributes itself along the street, and a loose tarp is a kite — so we weight whatever we cover, and we would rather tuck a container behind a windbreak than leave it standing in the open. Third, tornadoes: Weld has recorded more of them than any county in the United States, most of them short-lived landspouts on the Denver convergence zone, most of them on afternoons that looked unremarkable from the ground. Warnings come out of NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. A container left open through a real storm fills with water and grit, and you then pay us by the ton to carry it away. Cover it, or ask us for a tarp.

And there is one more calendar worth planning around here that no other market in this county has. Every May, three things land in the same fortnight. The last frost lifts around 12 May, so outdoor demolition and landscaping start. The university’s academic year ends in early May and leases turn over in a city that is 39.1 percent renter-occupied. And the City runs its two-day Spring Clean-Up, the one that refuses construction and demolition debris and turns away bagged loads. We do not publish a statistic about it, because there is not an honest one to publish — but that is the shape of the Greeley year, it is the busiest fortnight we have, and the practical advice is simply to book earlier in the first half of May than you think you need to. The other end of that cycle is mid-August. Our guide to move-out and rental turnover is written for landlords and property managers who live with both ends of it.

Collection in Lucerne is the county’s, and the shortest true description of it is that there is none. Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county. Not in Lucerne, not on any section road, not anywhere — and there is no municipal program either, because there is no municipality. There is a quicker test than reading a boundary map and it sits at the end of your own lane: if nothing comes for the household garbage, you are on unincorporated ground. What the county runs instead is drop-off. Weld County runs a household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley — free to every Weld County resident, open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in a container over five gallons, nothing leaking and nothing in a plastic bag. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there, so those need a route of their own. Paint, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals and automotive fluids cannot go in a roll-off, and this is where they go instead. The county also publishes a seasonal landfill voucher, one per Weld County address, for a single load. Every one of the seventeen places on this site is in Weld County, so both of those are open to every customer we have — which is a genuinely useful thing about working in one county instead of two. Out here you subscribe privately, you haul it yourself, or you rent a container, and for anything bigger than a cart the third option is usually the only one that works.

The city programs are worth knowing about only so you can rule them out. The Greeley Annual Spring Clean-Up is residents-only with photo ID, so a Lucerne address is not eligible; and it refuses “construction or demolition debris” in any case, along with bagged loads. The GROW Center takes clean untreated wood and green material on 970-673-3718. A bathroom, a basement, a barn clear-out or a roof tear-off does not fit in any of that, and a household hazardous waste counter certainly is not a place to take shingles. That, in one paragraph, is why a container exists out here. See construction debris disposal in Weld County for the detail.

Sizes we deliver to Lucerne