Where Does Your Debris Actually Go in Gwinnett County?

"Where does it all go?" is a fair question, and in Gwinnett County the answer isn't one place - it's several, depending on the material. Get the routing right and a job goes smoothly and cheaply; get it wrong and a load gets turned away at the gate. Here's the map.

Household trash: the county carts

Everyday household waste goes in the county cart. Gwinnett runs a mandatory subscription-hauler system - one of five haulers serves your district, billed through your property tax - giving each home a 95-gallon trash cart and a recycling cart, plus a couple of bulky-item pickups a week.

That covers the normal rhythm of a household. What it doesn't cover is a project: one cart and a bulky pickup won't absorb a remodel, a cleanout or a tear-off, and construction debris is explicitly a separate stream in the county.

Residential junk: the city center

City of Snellville residents have a second route for household tidy-ups: the recycling center on Marigold Road, which takes junk and yard debris from residents at one truckload a day. It's a good resource for clearing out a garage or a normal load.

But its own rules exclude remodeling and construction debris, and it's residents-only with no businesses. So it handles the resident's ordinary junk, not the project's debris - a distinction that sends a lot of renovators to us.

Construction debris: the C&D landfill

Construction and demolition debris - the drywall, framing, flooring, fixtures and shingles of a real project - routes to a licensed construction and demolition landfill, hauled by an authorized C&D waste hauler. This is the stream neither the cart nor the city center will take.

This is exactly what a roll-off does. You fill it on your driveway, and it goes to the right C&D facility. A hauler who knows the local routing gets your load to the correct gate the first time, tarped as Georgia law requires.

Yard waste: mulch, not landfill

Green waste takes its own path by law. Georgia's 1990 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Act bans yard trimmings from municipal landfills, so leaves, limbs, grass and brush are mulched or composted rather than buried.

That's why a big tree or storm job needs its green waste kept clean and separate - so it can be routed to mulch. Mix in lumber or dirt and it becomes mixed waste, losing the cleaner, cheaper route.

Clean concrete and metal: recycled

Two more streams do better than the landfill. Clean concrete, block and masonry can go to a crusher and become reusable base material. Scrap metal - old appliances, fixtures, framing offcuts - goes to a scrapyard.

Both are cheaper than C&D disposal, so keeping them out of the general container saves money on any sizeable job. The theme across all of this: clean, separated streams route better and cost less. We help you set the containers up so they do. Call (770) 746-7062.