Local Rules

Recycling Here Is Mandatory, Including Apartments

It is not a green gesture. It is a capacity decision about a City asset with a finite number of years left in it.

What the ordinance says

Chapter 57 of the Sioux Falls code of ordinances covers garbage and recycling, and it includes a mandatory recycling ordinance with a recycling goal and standard written into it.

The practical effect is that recycling is not a service you opt into. It is a requirement, and the arrangement runs through whichever licensed hauler you have chosen — because the City does not collect anything itself.

How it is provided varies. Some haulers supply a separate cart, some run a different schedule for it. What does not vary is that it has to happen.

⚠️ It covers apartments too

This is the part that catches building owners and managers, because in a lot of cities multifamily recycling is voluntary or simply absent.

If you own or manage a building here, recycling provision is your responsibility, not something individual tenants are expected to sort out for themselves. That means arranging it with your hauler, providing the containers and making sure residents can actually use them.

It is worth getting right at a turnover rather than discovering it during a complaint.

Why the City cares

Not sentiment. The stated purpose is to lengthen the life of the Sioux Falls Regional Sanitary Landfill.

That landfill is a City-owned asset — roughly 789 permitted acres spanning Minnehaha, Turner and Lincoln Counties, permitted for well over 150,000 tons a year. It serves a five-county region. And like every landfill it has a finite remaining capacity, after which the city has to build or buy another one, which is enormously expensive.

Seen that way the ordinance is infrastructure planning. Every ton diverted is a ton of remaining life, and the City is unusually direct about saying so.

It also explains why the yard waste rules are so specific: composting grass and leaves and grinding limbs into mulch keeps a large, seasonal, heavy stream out of the landfill entirely.

Electronics are a separate rule

Worth knowing before you load a container or put something at the curb.

Under ordinance § 57.049, fees are waived for residents of the counties served by the sanitary landfill bringing their electronics to that drop-off site. So for a household it is free.

Televisions, monitors and computers are the obvious ones. In a basement clear-out they turn up in quantity, and they cannot go in our containers either — the restriction follows the material, not the vehicle.

The hazardous waste facility

A genuinely good service, and one of the better-run ones in this part of the country.

The Household Hazardous Waste Facility is a permanent site where residents drop off unwanted hazardous waste and electronics for recycling and proper disposal, free of charge.

The conditions:

• Residents of the five-county region only — Lake, Lincoln, McCook, Minnehaha and Turner.
• All products in containers of five gallons or less.
• Leave products in their original containers. Decanting paint into an unlabelled bucket makes it unidentifiable and therefore unacceptable.

Paint, solvents, fuel, garden chemicals, batteries and pool chemicals all have a home here, and none of them have a home in a roll-off container.

⚠️ Who is shut out of the free facilities

The most important limitation on this page, and the one that sends most of our commercial work our way.

That is a hard line and it is stated plainly by the City. If you run a workshop, a farm, a church hall or a school, the free household facilities are not available to you no matter how ordinary the material is.

The same applies to the free seasonal yard waste sites: commercial businesses and contractors are not permitted and must use the Regional Sanitary Landfill or another approved facility.

So a farm with old chemicals, a church with a basement of accumulated paint, or a contractor with a trailer of brush all need a commercial route. That is a real gap, and it is worth planning for rather than discovering at the gate.

How recycling changes a clear-out

Beyond compliance, there is a straightforwardly financial reason to take this seriously on a big job.

• Cardboard is the big one. A move or a renovation generates an astonishing volume of it, and it is bulky and light — exactly the material that fills a container by volume without adding weight you are paying for.
• Glass and cans add up over a whole-house clearance.
• Scrap metal has positive value and a separate route entirely.
• Pulling all three first can drop you a container size.

We would genuinely rather you did that than hired a bigger box. It is cheaper for you and it is a cleaner load for us.

A short checklist

• Recycling is mandatory, arranged through your licensed hauler
• Multifamily buildings are covered — it is the owner's or manager's responsibility
• Electronics are not accepted at the landfill — HHW Facility instead
• Electronics drop-off is free for residents of the served counties
• HHW Facility: five-county residents, 5-gallon containers, original packaging
• ⚠️ Businesses, farms, churches and schools are excluded from the free facilities
• ⚠️ Contractors cannot use the free seasonal yard waste sites
• Pull cardboard, glass and cans out of a clear-out before sizing a container
• Scrap metal has value and its own route
• Remember the purpose: landfill life, not paperwork