Where every Trashbagging answer comes from, and what the site will not do.

Every Trashbagging collection rule comes from the city, county or hauler that runs the service. A pickup day, a fee, a holiday slide or a list of accepted materials goes on a page only after we find it on that organization’s own page, ordinance or rate sheet. When no official page states a fact, the fact stays off the site.

What counts as an official source

An official source is published by the body responsible for the service. That means the city, the county, the solid waste authority or the hauler-of-record, the company a city or county has contracted to collect on your street. Their own web pages count. So do adopted ordinances, council-approved budgets, rate sheets and the printed calendars they mail to residents.

News stories are not sources for a rule. Neither are aggregator sites that list schedules for thousands of cities, or a national hauler’s brand page. A national company may serve your town, but its marketing page does not show that it is the assigned collector for your address. Only the city’s or county’s contract, permitted-hauler list or service page does. A news story can point us to a change, and then we confirm the change on the official page before anything is written.

When two official pages disagree

Official pages sometimes contradict each other. A city’s recycling page may list a material that last year’s calendar still rejects, or a rate page may lag behind a newly adopted ordinance. The rule is simple: the more specific page wins over the general one, and the more recent page wins over the older one. A street-level lookup beats a citywide summary. An ordinance adopted this year beats a rate table from two years ago.

When the difference matters to a resident, for example two different fees for the same cart, the page names both sources and says which one applies to whom.

What the site never does

  • It never assigns a pickup day to a street. Days depend on the address, so every city page links the official lookup instead.
  • It never lets advertising change an answer. A company that pays for a listing or an ad does not become the collector shown for a city.
  • It never invents a weekday, a fee, an accepted material or a holiday slide. A fact the official pages do not state is left out.
  • It never publishes a city page before its core facts are confirmed: who collects and whom they serve, the pickup-day lookup, how often each cart goes, bulk pickup, holidays and hazardous waste drop-off. Until then the city stays a row on its state page, with a link to its official collection page.

How pages are kept current

Collection rules change with new contracts, new budgets and new calendars. City pages and drop-off site records are re-checked on a schedule against the same official pages they were built from. Holiday tables list only dates still ahead, and each December they are refreshed with the next year’s dates as cities publish them. The holiday rules page follows the same cycle.

Readers are the other half of the system. When you tell us a page is wrong, we open the official source, and if it confirms the report, the page is fixed and the change goes into the corrections log.

How the trash fees study is computed

The trash fees page and the yearly fees study compare what a household pays for trash pickup in each city. To keep the numbers comparable, each city gets one figure: the standard residential rate for one single-family home, using the default cart or the smallest standard cart the city offers. Taxes and fees that the rate page itself names are included.

Rates billed by the quarter or the year are divided down to one month. Where trash service is paid for out of property taxes or general taxes, the monthly figure is 0 and the city is listed separately, so tax-funded service does not pull the averages down. Every figure comes from the city’s or the hauler-of-record’s own rate page, and each one carries the date the rate took effect.

How collectors are rated

Each trash collector in the company directory, a city department, a county or a private hauler, can carry a Trashbagging rating from 0 to 10. It combines three parts, and the collector’s page shows each part next to the total.

  • Public reputation (40%). For a private hauler: the star ratings on public review platforms that show at least 50 reviews, such as Trustpilot, BBB and Google, averaged by the number of reviews and doubled to a 10-point scale. For a city or county department: the share of residents satisfied with trash collection in the latest resident survey the city or county published (78% satisfied counts as 7.8). The collector’s page names every platform or survey used and links it.
  • Service transparency (30%). One point for each of ten things the collector publishes on its own pages: an address lookup for the pickup day, a holiday schedule, service alerts, an online missed-pickup report, residential rates, a recycling list of what is accepted and refused, bulk-item rules with the price or free allowance, a route for hazardous waste or electronics, a customer service phone with hours, and written service terms or the code chapter that governs service.
  • Trashbagging reader reviews (30%). The average of the reviews readers send through the review form on each collector’s page, doubled to a 10-point scale. This part counts once a collector has at least five published reviews.

When a part has no data, its weight moves to the other parts, and the page says which part is missing. A collector with neither public reputation data nor five reader reviews gets no rating, because transparency alone does not say how the service works on the street.

The public reputation part reports what customers say, not what we found ourselves. Complaint counts and themes come from the platform’s own totals, and the page links each one. We do not copy other people’s reviews, and a collector cannot pay to change its rating or remove a review.

Reader reviews are checked before they appear. A review is published when it describes the writer’s own experience with that collector, and is left out when it carries a street address, an account or phone number, another person’s name, insults or advertising, or is about a different company. We do not edit a review’s wording.

How to report an error

If a day, a fee, an address or a rule on Trashbagging does not match what your city or hauler says, report a correction. Include the page, what is wrong and, if you have it, the link to the official page that shows the right answer. Reports are read by a person, checked against the official source and, when confirmed, fixed.