New York Recycling and Disposal Rules, Explained Plainly

People call and ask what New York bans from the landfill, expecting a list. Some states publish one. New York does not. What New York has instead is a delegation statute and a handful of product-specific rules scattered across separate Titles of the Environmental Conservation Law. It is a genuinely different structure, and it explains why the rules that govern your debris in Rochester came out of City Hall and the County office building rather than Albany.

Here is how it actually works, what it means for what you can put in a container, and where the things that cannot go in are supposed to go instead.

There is no New York waste ban list

The controlling statute is General Municipal Law § 120-aa, titled “Source separation and segregation of recyclable or reuseable materials.” It does not ban anything. It orders every municipality in the state to write its own law requiring that solid waste left out for collection be separated into recyclable, reuseable and other components. The statutory deadline was no later than 1 September 1992.

So the operative rule for your street is municipal, not statewide. Rochester complied with City Code Chapter 20, Article IV, adopted 19 November 1991, nearly a year ahead of the deadline. The towns around us each did the same thing on their own timeline and in their own words. That is why the answer to “can I throw this out” in Rochester is not the same sentence as the answer in Buffalo or in Syracuse.

If you take one thing from this article, take that. Anyone who tells you the state keeps a consolidated list of banned materials is describing a different state.

The product bans New York does have

Statewide prohibitions exist, but they are product by product, and each one lives in its own Title of Article 27 of the Environmental Conservation Law. There are five that matter to anyone loading a container.

Electronics

Since 1 January 2015, covered electronic equipment cannot go in a landfill, a waste-to-energy plant, the trash, or out at the curb. Televisions, monitors, computers, printers, small servers, tablets. This is the rule most often broken by accident during a cleanout, because a basement in an old Rochester house always contains at least one television nobody has watched since analog.

Pull them before you load. The Monroe County ecopark takes electronics with no appointment.

Rechargeable batteries

NYSDEC puts it plainly: it is illegal for any person to throw covered rechargeable batteries in the trash. A 2025 amendment extended that to e-bike and e-scooter batteries, which matters more every year. Those packs are also a genuine fire risk in a loaded container and in the back of a truck. If you have one, it goes to the ecopark, not in the box.

Tires and mercury thermostats

Waste tires cannot be buried. Practically, that means the four car tires in the back of the garage are not part of your cleanout load, and if someone drops a set into an open container overnight, they have to come back out.

Mercury thermostats have been banned from disposal since 2005, and this is the one worth flagging to anyone doing demolition. NYSDEC states that contractors demolishing buildings are required to bring mercury thermostats to collection programs. That is a demolition-specific duty written into a product rule, and in a city where most of the housing stock predates 1980, round mercury-bulb thermostats are still on plenty of walls. Take it off before the wall comes down. Our page on demolition debris removal covers the rest of the pre-demolition checklist.

Paint

PaintCare has operated in New York since May 2022, under Title 20. Leftover architectural paint, stain and varnish goes back to a participating drop-off site rather than into a container. Full or partly full cans are not container material anyway. They are liquid, they are heavy, and they open in transit. PaintCare publishes the drop-off locations.

Dried-out, hardened cans with the lid off are a different question and depend on the site. Ask us before you assume.

New York has no mattress program

State this one plainly because the internet is full of the opposite. New York has no mattress stewardship program. There is no statewide mattress recycling fee collected at the point of sale, and there is no statewide take-back network. Legislation has been introduced, but nothing is in effect.

What that means for you is simple. Mattresses and box springs from a cleanout are ordinary bulky debris and they ride in the container. They are voluminous, so break the job down accordingly, and count on a mattress eating more space than it looks like it should.

Monroe County curbside, and its very specific rules

The curbside bin is a separate system from the container in your driveway, and Monroe County publishes rules that are more particular than most people realise. If you are doing a cleanout, some of what you find genuinely belongs in the bin rather than the box, and it is worth knowing which.

• Cardboard flattened, maximum 2 ft × 4 ft. Bigger than that and it needs to be cut down.
• Shredded paper in brown paper bags only. Not loose, not in plastic.
• To-go cups: clear or white only. Colored ones are out.
• Lids and caps reattached on bottles, jugs, jars and tubs.

And a long list that is not accepted at the curb at all: colored plastic party cups, plastic bags, black plastic, compostable plastic, foam egg cartons, coffee pods, straws, utensils, prescription bottles, lithium batteries, sharps, propane tanks, e-cigarettes, electronics, clamshells, cord and food waste.

The County publishes a consumer guide called the Recyclopedia for exactly this reason. It is worth ten minutes before a big cleanout, because the paper and cardboard that comes out of an attic is often the largest single volume in the job, and none of it needs to be paid for by weight.

The Monroe County ecopark

This is the most useful address in this article. The ecopark sits at 10 Avion Drive, Rochester, NY 14624, operated as a partnership between Monroe County and WM.

• Hours: Wednesday 1:00 pm to 6:30 pm, and Saturday 7:30 am to 1:00 pm. Closed holidays.
• An appointment is required for household hazardous waste. That is paint, solvents, fuel, pesticides, pool chemicals, automotive fluids.
• No appointment is needed for electronics, appliances, pharmaceuticals, sharps, fluorescent lights, scrap metal, propane tanks, rechargeable batteries, paper and cardboard, plastics, textiles, or document shredding.
• For use by Monroe County residents only.
• Some items are fee-based, and those are credit or debit card only, Mastercard and Visa.

Appointment for hazardous, walk-in for electronics. That distinction catches more people than anything else about the place. If you are planning a cleanout, book the household hazardous waste slot before you start, not after you have a milk crate of half-used solvents in the driveway. Our home cleanout checklist puts that step in the right order.

Why construction debris is on you, not the City

There is a sentence in the City code that settles a lot of arguments. City of Rochester Municipal Code § 20-15F:

“Contractors performing work must make arrangements for the proper and legal collection and disposal of waste generated during the construction process and such waste shall not be collected by the City.”

That is the City stating outright that construction waste is not on its route. The City provides one City-issued container for refuse storage under § 20-12A, requires containers stored at the rear or side yard under § 20-14, and sets out rules for when refuse goes to the curb under § 20-15B. None of that covers the wall you took down.

The next question people ask is whether they can just haul it themselves. In Monroe County the answer is usually no. Mill Seat Landfill, which the County owns in the Town of Riga, is posted as commercial accounts only, no residential customers. A homeowner cannot pull up with a pickup full of plaster. That gap between “the City will not take it” and “the landfill will not take you” is precisely the space roll-off service occupies here.

The two landfills and the recycling center

Monroe County is unusual in owning its own disposal capacity. Mill Seat Landfill in the Town of Riga is County-owned, operated under a long-term lease by WM, and holds the DEC permit in the County’s name. High Acres Landfill and Recycling Center sits on the eastern edge of the county in the Town of Perinton, crossing into the Town of Macedon in Wayne County, and is owned and run by Waste Management of New York. The County also runs the Monroe County Recycling Center, which is where the curbside material with the reattached bottle caps actually goes.

None of that changes what you can put in a container, but it explains why the local answers here are county answers. Recycling policy, hazardous waste and disposal capacity in this market all run through the same County government.

The full construction picture, including the survey rules and the three dates that decide a Rochester renovation, is in construction debris disposal in New York.

Commercial users owe a plan, not just a bin

The source-separation duty in Rochester does not stop at the curb in front of a house. City Code § 20-55(A) puts the obligation on commercial users directly: it is the responsibility of the commercial user to identify any items designated as recyclable and to prepare a plan for the source separation and collection of those items. Commercial recycling plans are mandatory in the City of Rochester.

In practice that means a shop, an office, a restaurant or a landlord with a commercial account is expected to have thought about cardboard, paper, containers and metal before the roll-off shows up, not after. It also means the cleanest jobs we run are the ones where somebody separated the cardboard first. On a retail or office clear-out, corrugated is frequently the single largest volume in the building, and it does not need to be paid for by weight in a mixed load.

What we will not take in a container

Our list is short and none of it is arbitrary.

1. Asbestos. We do not accept it. Asbestos in New York moves under a separate NYSDEC Part 364 permit and must be handled by a NYSDOL-licensed asbestos contractor under 12 NYCRR Part 56. Part 364 governs waste transporters, and asbestos sits in the permit tier, not the registration tier. It is a different truck and a different license.
2. Electronics, rechargeable batteries and tires. Banned by the Titles above.
3. Household hazardous waste, liquid paint, fuel and solvents. Ecopark, by appointment.
4. Mercury thermostats. Off the wall and into a collection program before demolition.
5. Propane tanks, pressurized cylinders and anything sealed under pressure. Ecopark takes propane tanks with no appointment.
6. Loose medical sharps. Ecopark, no appointment.

Everything else on an ordinary Rochester job goes in the box: plaster, lath, framing, flooring, roofing, cabinets, furniture, carpet, appliances without refrigerant, brush, fencing, decking, siding and the general accumulated contents of a hundred-year-old basement. If you are unsure how much of that fits, start with our guide to container sizes.

The short version

New York does not ban materials from a central list. It ordered every municipality to write a source-separation law by 1 September 1992, and it separately banned five specific product categories, each in its own Title. Rochester wrote its law in November 1991. Monroe County runs the recycling center, the ecopark and the landfill. The City will not take construction debris and the County landfill will not take you.

That leaves a fairly clean division of labor. Curbside handles the bin. The ecopark handles the hazardous, the electronic and the awkward. The container handles the building. If you are not sure which pile something belongs in, call (585) 514-5622 and ask before it goes in the box. It is a two-minute phone call and it is a lot cheaper than a rejected load.