Where does Jacksonville's junk actually go?

The short answer: the order of preference

Every load gets worked in the same order.

1. Reuse. Anything genuinely usable goes to donation rather than to a facility.
2. Recycling. Metal, appliances, electronics and clean rigid materials go to processors that want them.
3. Licensed disposal. Everything that has no viable destination goes to a permitted facility, with a receipt.

That is the honest sequence. What it is not is a promise that everything gets diverted - and any operator telling you a household load is 100% recycled is selling you something. What we will tell you is where each material actually goes, which is what the rest of this page is.

All of it is inside the price. A sofa is $126, a refrigerator is $164, a quarter truck is $241, minimum $75 per visit, with disposal and facility fees included and no separate environmental charge.

Donation: what actually qualifies

Reuse is the best outcome by a distance, and the screening is the same as any charity would apply directly:

• Clean, dry, structurally sound furniture with all its hardware
• Working small appliances
• Solid wood pieces
• Unopened, undamaged household goods

What never qualifies, regardless of who is looking at it: used mattresses, anything with staining or a smell, anything with mildew, cribs of older design that no longer meet federal safety standards, and flat-pack furniture that has swollen at the joints.

If you have something genuinely good, tell us before the job. It is much easier to route a clean solid-wood dresser to donation when it is flagged in advance than to find it at the bottom of a truck.

Metal and appliances

This is the biggest genuine recycling stream in a household load, and it is bigger than people expect.

Steel and aluminum have a real market, so it makes sense for everyone to pull them out. That includes washers, dryers, ranges, water heaters, metal bed frames, exercise equipment, filing cabinets, patio furniture frames, barbecues, bicycles, and the springs inside a mattress when it goes to a processor that tears them down.

Appliances with a sealed refrigerant system - refrigerators, freezers, window and portable air conditioners, outdoor condensers, heat pumps, dehumidifiers - go through an extra step first. Federal rules require the refrigerant to be recovered by certified technicians before the shell is scrapped. Once that is done, the metal goes to scrap like anything else. That handling is already inside the price of a $164 refrigerator; there is no surcharge for it.

Electronics

Televisions, monitors, computers and general e-waste go to electronics processors rather than into general waste, because of the materials in older displays and circuit boards. Boards, wiring and casings get separated, and metals are recovered.

Jacksonville produces a lot of this stream. Northeast Florida has one of the heaviest thunderstorm seasons in the country, so surge damage - both during storms and again on restoration after an outage - kills televisions, routers and outdoor equipment in waves. The two weeks after a named storm is reliably our biggest electronics period.

Wipe your devices before we collect them. Factory reset smart TVs, remove or wipe computer drives, and clear printers and copiers, which frequently store scanned documents. Once the truck leaves, that is not recoverable.

Building materials and yard debris

Concrete and masonry go to crushing operations and come back as aggregate. This is one of the highest-diversion materials there is, which is why it has its own line at $219 per quarter truck rather than being mixed with general debris.

Clean timber from renovation work has destinations depending on condition and treatment.

Vegetative material - branches, palm fronds, yard clearance - goes to mulch and biomass rather than landfill. After a storm this is an enormous volume in Jacksonville, and during a declared event the city normally issues separate instructions for how to separate and place it curbside. Check the current guidance after an event, because those rules differ from ordinary collection.

Cardboard and paper recycle well when dry. In this climate they very often are not, which is covered below.

What genuinely goes to landfill

Being straight about this is more useful than a diversion percentage nobody can verify.

These materials have no viable recycling route in a normal household load, and they go to licensed disposal - which for Duval County means the municipal landfill out on the Westside:

• Upholstered furniture. Mixed foam, fabric, timber and staples. There is no practical separation process for a sofa.
• Mattresses, in most cases. Recyclable in principle, but Florida has no statewide stewardship program funding teardown, and damp or mildewed mattresses are refused by recyclers anyway.
• Carpet and carpet pad.
• Particleboard and flat-pack furniture. Glued composite, especially once it has been damp.
• Mixed household waste - the bagged contents of a drawer, a shed, a garage shelf.

That is the honest majority of a typical residential clear-out by volume, here and everywhere. The metal, appliances, electronics and masonry are the parts that genuinely divert.

The Jacksonville humidity effect

One local factor materially changes the mix here compared with a drier or colder city, and it is worth understanding.

Air conditioning is what dehumidifies a Florida home. Anything stored in unconditioned space - a garage, a carport, a backyard shed, a screened lanai, an unconditioned Florida room, an attic, or a non-climate-controlled storage unit - develops mildew over a season or two. With no basements in Florida, that is exactly where most stored household goods live.

The consequence: the share of a Jacksonville load that could have been donated is smaller than it would be in Denver or Minneapolis, because the upholstery, the boxed clothing, the books and the cardboard have already failed. It is not a sorting problem, it is a climate one.

Which gives you a genuinely useful lever. If you want a better outcome for your things, deal with them while they are still indoors and still dry. A clean sofa from a conditioned living room in Avondale has a donation route. The same sofa after eighteen months in a carport does not.

Why the destination matters to you personally

Beyond the environmental case, there is a self-interested one.

Illegally dumped loads in Duval County are traced through their contents - mail and bills left in drawers, prescription and delivery labels, appliance serial numbers. If a load that left your address ends up in a wooded lot off a Westside or Northside road, it is your name on the paperwork and your problem to explain, whoever actually tipped it. Florida treats illegal dumping as a criminal matter, and the rate of it rises sharply in the weeks after a storm when facilities are backed up.

So ask any hauler two questions: which licensed facility does this go to, and will you send me the disposal receipt. Legitimate operators answer both immediately. And empty every drawer before anything leaves the house, regardless of who is taking it.

Frequently asked questions