Local Rules

Two Inches, Three and a Half Feet, and Paper Bags Only

It is free, it is genuinely good, and it is fussier than almost anyone realises. Most of what gets left behind is left for one of four reasons.

A free service the City actually runs

Given that the City collects no trash at all, it is worth being clear that this one is different.

The City of Champaign runs a free seasonal yard waste collection for residential properties inside the city limits. It runs in spring and again in fall, organized in zones - a Blue Zone and an Orange Zone - with several collection dates for every property across the season.

The scale is real. A single fall collection has run to well over a hundred and fifty thousand bags citywide, and a spring collection to more than eighty thousand. This is not a token program.

It is also, in the nicest possible way, extremely particular about what it will take.

⚠️ The branch limits

The rule that catches almost everyone, and the reason we get called.

Two inches is not very much. It is a branch you can comfortably close a hand around - roughly a broom handle and a bit. Three and a half feet is shorter than most people cut by instinct.

The consequences:

• Anything off a mature tree needs cutting down twice. One limb from an old maple becomes a dozen pieces, and then those pieces have to be bundled.
• Non-metallic twine matters. Wire and plastic-cored twine foul the processing equipment, and a bundle tied with the wrong thing is a bundle left at the curb.
• Trunk sections, stumps and root balls are out entirely, at any length.
• The bundling is the work. On any real tree job, the labor of cutting and tying to spec costs more than a container does.

⚠️ The bag rules

Almost as particular, and the second most common reason something gets left.

• Paper yard waste bags only. The kind sold at any hardware or big-box store. Not plastic sacks, not bins, not boxes.
• Not taped. Fold the top closed instead.
• Not torn and not ripped. A bag that has split in the rain will be left, and after a wet week that is a lot of bags.
• Leaves, grass clippings and plant material only.

The tape rule surprises people. A taped bag cannot be opened and emptied the way the process needs, so it is simply not collected.

Where the bags have to sit

Precise, and worth getting right after you have done all that bagging.

• Within 10 feet of the curb, at the street edge or along the city right-of-way.
• At least 5 feet clear of obstacles - mailboxes, trees, telephone poles and fire hydrants.
• Out by 6 a.m. on your scheduled date. Not the morning of, at your convenience - by six.

The five-foot clearance is about the grapple arm, not tidiness. A bag tucked against a mailbox cannot be picked up without risking the mailbox.

And note that collection dates are set by zone and can move. Winter has arrived early enough before to pull crews onto snow and ice control mid-program, pushing the last collections back by more than a week.

What will not be collected

Bags containing any of these are left where they are:

• Rocks - including decorative gravel and landscape stone
• Glass
• Potted plants - the pot and the soil are the problem
• Mulch
• Pet waste

Two of those - rock and soil - are also the heaviest material anyone deals with in a garden, and they are exactly what a landscaping rebuild produces most of. A xeriscape or hardscape conversion generates a container's worth of material that this program will never take.

Woody material goes to Urbana

The destination for everything outside the bag rules.

The Landscape Recycling Center at 1210 E. University Avenue in Urbana takes landscape material year round, for a fee. Phone (217) 344-5323.

That is where branches, brush and anything over the two-inch limit belong. It is also the answer for residents outside the city limits, who have no municipal collection to use.

It is a genuinely useful facility and we would rather point you at it than sell you a container you do not need. What it will not do is come to your driveway, load itself, or take a whole tree in one trip.

Outside the city limits

Most of our service area is outside Champaign, and none of the above applies there.

The free seasonal collection is for residential properties within the Champaign city limits. If you are in Savoy, Mahomet, Rantoul, St. Joseph, Tolono or any of the villages, your village has its own arrangements - or none - and your options are composting, a private hauler, or the Landscape Recycling Center.

⚠️ Burning is a separate question with a sharp edge to it, and it is covered in its own article - the prohibition reaches further outside the city limits than most people expect.

When a container makes more sense

• Anything with branches over two inches - which is most real tree work
• Stumps, root balls and trunk sections, which are excluded at any size
• Landscaping rebuilds with soil, sod, rock or old mulch
• Deck and fence demolition - treated timber was never yard waste
• Work out of season, when the program is not running
• Work outside the city limits, where there is no program
• Any job where bundling to spec would take longer than loading a box