City services

What Longview City Collection Will and Will Not Take

You are already paying for a genuinely generous city service. Knowing exactly where its limits sit tells you when you need a container and when you do not.

Start with what you already pay for

We are a dumpster company, so this may be an odd thing to lead with: for a lot of household jobs in Longview you should not rent a container at all.

City of Longview sanitation customers get weekly garbage, weekly recycling, a weekly yard waste service and four bulky item collections a year, all on the same bill. It is a more generous package than a lot of Texas cities offer, and plenty of people underuse it.

So work out whether your job fits inside it first. If it does, we will tell you. If it does not, the rest of this explains exactly where the line sits.

Two universal points. Everything goes out no earlier than 6:00 PM the day before and no later than 7:30 AM on collection day. And trash, recycling and yard waste are all collected on the same day by different trucks, which is why one of them going past without taking your pile does not mean you have been forgotten.

Bulky item service: four a year, eight cubic yards

Every residential sanitation address gets four bulky item collections per rolling twelve month period as part of basic service. Each is limited to eight cubic yards — which the city describes as about two small pickup truck loads.

It is not automatic. You have to book it, either on 903-237-1250 or through the city's CitySend app.

Two details worth planning around. Four collections in a rolling twelve months means they replenish gradually rather than resetting on 1 January — so if you used two in March, you get those back in March. And if bulky items remain after the crew has taken their eight cubic yards, the rest stays. Additional collections are available for a fee.

The $20 mattress and appliance fee

Worth knowing before you plan a clear-out around the city service:

That is per item. A house with four mattresses and two old appliances is $120 before you have touched anything else — and there is no such surcharge on our containers.

So the arithmetic for an estate clear-out or a rental turnover often points to a container for the bulk of it, with the city service used for whatever is left at the end.

Yard waste: weekly, eight cubic yards

Yard waste is collected weekly, separately from garbage, by its own truck. It covers leaves, pine needles, bundled brush and grass clippings.

The rules are specific:

• Must be in paper bags or in personal containers marked "Yard Waste". Plastic bags are not the route.
• Limited to eight cubic yards per customer per week.
• Must be kept at least four feet away from the garbage and recycling carts — this is so the automated arms can work, and a pile too close is a common reason for a miss.

Everything collected goes to the City Compost Site to be turned into mulch and compost rather than landfilled, which is a genuinely good outcome for the pine needle volume this region produces.

The three-to-ten-foot brush rule

This trips people up constantly, because brush is split across two different services depending on length.

• Branches under 3 feet should be bundled and put out for the regular yard waste collection.
• Branches between 3 and 10 feet are the bulky item service — booked, not automatic.

Which leaves an obvious gap: anything over ten feet is outside both. A pine trunk, a large limb from a mature hardwood, or a whole tree does not fit either service at any length you can practically cut it to without a lot of work.

That is the point at which a container becomes the answer, and it is the single most common reason people call us after a storm.

What is excluded outright

City collection will not accept:

Rocks and dirt catch out anyone doing landscaping — there is no free route for spoil, and it is heavy enough that it needs a small container part-filled rather than a large one.

Tyres need a tyre retailer. Even the Pine Hill Landfill will only take them split, quartered or shredded.

The compost site

The City Compost Site takes limbs, brush, tree trunks, leaves, grass clippings, pine straw and other biodegradable yard waste — and notably it takes tree trunks, which the kerbside services do not.

Finished mulch and compost are free to Sanitation customers, subject to availability. If you are doing any planting, that is worth knowing.

Access needs proof of sanitation service — a current City of Longview water bill — plus a matching driver's licence. It is a customer benefit rather than a public facility, so an address in White Oak, Lakeport or the county cannot use it.

When a container is the right answer

• Anything over ten feet — trunks and large limbs fall through both services.
• More than eight cubic yards at once, which one mature pine easily exceeds.
• You have used your four collections for the year.
• Multiple mattresses or appliances, where the $20-per-item fee adds up.
• Rocks, dirt or landscaping spoil, excluded outright.
• Renovation debris at any real volume — the city will collect C&D for a fee, but a container is usually better on anything substantial.
• Anything a contractor generated. That debris is theirs to remove.
• Business, church, apartment or rental property, outside the residential service.
• Any address outside City of Longview sanitation — White Oak, Lakeport, Kilgore, Liberty City and the county all have their own arrangements, and none of the above applies.

Call and describe what you are clearing. If the city services will handle it, we will say so — and if they genuinely will not, we will put you in the right size container.