Republic Services: reviews, rating and service info

Republic Services reviews on the BBB and Trustpilot are mostly about missed pickups, rising bills with extra fees and slow refunds after cancelling. A local Republic subsidiary collects only under your city’s contract or your own account, so check your city or county page to see who serves your street.

Republic Services is a national recycling and waste company, but the service at a home is run and billed by a local operating subsidiary named on the invoice. It collects at an address only under the city’s contract or franchise or a subscription the household sets up. Holiday changes and alerts are published per address. Enter your address in Republic’s schedule and holiday tools, and check your city’s page for who is assigned.

Where the company collects

Republic’s locations page lists facilities in 46 states and the District of Columbia, which is the company’s own claim; it has no entry for Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska or South Dakota. A state on that list does not mean every city in it. Republic says it partners with thousands of municipalities, and it also sells curbside service directly to households. The residential terms say Republic Services, Inc. itself performs no waste service and signs no service contract; the operating subsidiary on your invoice does both.

How to tell if it is your hauler

The locations page asks for your address to show whether Republic serves it, or lets you browse by state and city. That answer covers availability, not assignment. Your city’s solid waste page says whether the city contracts one hauler, runs its own trucks or leaves residents to choose. If you are already a customer, your invoice names the Republic company that serves you.

Holiday schedules and service alerts

Republic has no single national holiday table. The holiday schedule page and the service alerts page both ask for your service address and show the changes for that address. With an online account you get alerts on your dashboard and can track your truck on service day. Cities that contract with Republic may also have a city page with service alerts, holiday schedules, calendars and collection maps.

What they collect

Republic’s corporate pages describe curbside trash and recycling, bulk pickup for items such as furniture, appliances and mattresses, yard waste, food and organic waste, bulbs and batteries, electronics, household hazardous waste options, sharps disposal and dumpster rental. Which of these your address gets depends on the local contract or your subscription, so check your city page or account.

Customer service

• Report a missed pickup by logging in to your online account; you need an account linked to your service to report one.
• The online account also handles bill pay, autopay, schedules and alerts. Republic’s pages offer a virtual agent by chat and a contact page, and the support page says calls Wednesday to Friday have much shorter waits.
• Subscription customers without a signed agreement pay under the residential service terms: payment is due within 20 days of the invoice, with an 18% Environmental Recovery Fee, a Fuel Recovery Fee that changes monthly, and a $5.95 administrative fee per invoice.

What this is not

A Republic truck on your street, or a Republic notice from another city, does not make Republic your hauler or set your holiday rule. Where your city collects its own trash, Republic’s tools do not apply.

Republic Services reviews and complaints

Republic Services is not accredited by the BBB, and Republic’s BBB profile gives it an A+ rating. That profile, which covers Republic’s headquarters and its corporate-owned locations, lists 2,078 complaints in the last three years, 795 of them closed in the last 12 months. Almost half of them, 972, are filed as service or repair issues, and 396 as billing issues. BBB customer reviews of Republic average 1.06 out of 5 from 603 reviews. On Trustpilot, Republic’s profile, which the company has not claimed, averages 1.3 out of 5 from 313 reviews.

The same problems come up again and again in those complaints and reviews:

• missed trash and recycling pickups, with residents calling several times before a truck comes back;
• bills that climb from year to year, extra fees on the invoice and a charge to take the carts away when service ends;
• cancelling: refunds that take weeks or months, and charges that keep coming after the account is closed;
• customer service that is hard to reach, with long holds, transfers and callbacks that do not come.

These are customers’ accounts, not findings of ours. A national total mixes hundreds of local operations, so it says little about the crew on one street: your city or county page says who is assigned there.

On Trashbagging

Check the city first: States & Cities. The King County edition lists Republic Services among the haulers that the county’s finder can name for an unincorporated address.

Context photo: Recycling and waste sorting stations at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Intel Free Press, 2013-09-02. CC BY 2.0 · Source. Resized for web.