Local Rules

The City Licenses Your Hauler. It Does Not Employ One.

Nobody from the City will ever collect your bin. But the City decides what your hauler has to do for you, and most people are owed more than they are getting.

Nobody from the City collects anything

This surprises people who move here from a city with municipal collection, and it surprises people moving across town from Urbana, which handles it differently.

There is no city truck, no city bin and no line on a city bill. You choose a hauler, you contract with them directly, and you pay them. Rates, cart sizes and what happens when a cart goes missing are all between you and that company.

So far this sounds like a completely deregulated market. It is not, and that is the part almost nobody knows.

⚠️ But subscribing is not optional

The City may not collect your rubbish, but it has an opinion about whether somebody does.

City ordinance requires every household to have weekly solid waste collection from a licensed private hauler. Not "should". Not "is encouraged to". Every household.

Alongside it: burning and garbage buildup are not allowed in the City. Those two rules together close the loop. You cannot opt out of collection and deal with it yourself, because the two obvious ways of dealing with it yourself are both prohibited.

What this means in practice:

• If you have just moved in and nothing is being collected, no hauler has your address yet. Nothing happens by default here. Call one.
• A vacant or between-tenants property still needs an arrangement if anyone is generating waste there.
• Letting it accumulate is its own violation, separate from not having a hauler.

⚠️ What your hauler MUST include

The single most useful thing on this page, and the thing most residents do not know they are entitled to.

The detail matters:

• It must be collected at least weekly.
• The hauler may not count it toward the per-container cost of service. In other words they cannot quietly price it in by calling your recycling a second container.
• Materials do not need to be sorted.
• The accepted list is set by ordinance, and was expanded at the start of 2017. It is broader than many residents assume.
• Some haulers provide a cart or bin; you may also use your own.

If you are paying a separate recycling fee on a one-to-four unit property in Champaign, that is worth a conversation with your hauler. And if you have simply never been offered it, ask - plenty of households here have been putting recyclables in the trash for years without realising the service was already bought and paid for.

How the license works

Worth understanding, because it tells you what a legitimate operator looks like.

A commercial hauler in Champaign is anyone who charges a fee to collect and transport municipal waste, landscape waste or recyclable material for disposal somewhere other than where it was generated. That definition covers ordinary weekly collection and it covers roll-off containers.

• An application goes in by 1 August each year.
• The fee is $100 per vehicle per year, charged separately for each of municipal waste, landscape waste and recyclable materials.
• The City Clerk issues the licenses.
• Quarterly reporting is a condition of holding one. Haulers must report how much of each recyclable material they collected, plus municipal solid waste and landscape waste tonnages, by the last business day of the month after each quarter ends.
• Failure to report can mean fines, or suspension or revocation of the license for repeated violations.

That quarterly tonnage return is unusual, and it is the reason the City can tell whether its recycling requirement is actually being met rather than just written down.

No hours are regulated

A small thing that generates a surprising number of complaints.

The City does not regulate trash or recycling collection hours, because no ordinance governs hauler operating times. If your hauler runs at half past five in the morning, that is a matter between you and them, not a code issue.

Worth knowing before you call the City about it - and worth asking about before you sign up, if you are a light sleeper.

Businesses are on their own

The City of Champaign provides no commercial trash or recycling service. Businesses contact a private hauler directly to set up service and get pricing.

The mandated free-recycling rule above covers residences of one to four units. It does not cover commercial premises, so what a business gets - cardboard-only collection, co-mingled recycling, nothing at all - depends entirely on what it negotiates. Each hauler sets its own rates and offers different options.

For anyone running a shop, a restaurant or an office here, that is worth actually shopping around on.

Where a container fits

We would rather you used the service you are already paying for than paid us unnecessarily. A roll-off earns its place when:

• The material is construction or demolition debris. No weekly residential service covers it.
• The volume is a clear-out rather than a week's waste - a basement, a garage, a whole house.
• The yard work exceeds the City's seasonal bag rules, which it usually does the moment a branch is involved.
• You need it gone on a date - a closing, a lease turnover, family in town for a week.
• You are a business, where nothing is mandated and everything is negotiated.
• It is May or August near campus, when the volume is nothing like a normal week.

And because a roll-off company is itself a commercial hauler under the ordinance, it needs the same City license your weekly collector does. That is a fair question to ask anyone quoting you.

A short checklist

• The City collects nothing - you hire a licensed private hauler
• Weekly collection is required by ordinance, not optional
• Burning and garbage buildup are both prohibited in the City
• ⭐ Curbside recycling is included free in basic service for 1-4 unit residences
• It must be at least weekly and cannot be priced through the container cost
• Materials do not need sorting
• Haulers license by 1 August, $100 per vehicle per year, per waste stream
• Quarterly tonnage reporting is a license condition
• Collection hours are not regulated by the City
• Businesses get nothing mandated - negotiate it