Garbage and Recycling in Tampa

The City of Tampa Department of Solid Waste and Environmental Program Management collects garbage, yard waste and household recycling for most of Tampa, while New Tampa is served by Hillsborough County.

The department describes a 266-person team serving nearly 90,000 residential and commercial customers, and it provides 100 percent of the residential garbage, yard waste and household recycling collection in the city's service area. Commercial service is split: the city provides 65 percent of commercial collection and issues contracts to private hauling companies for the other 35 percent. Customer questions go to the City of Tampa Utilities Call Center at (813) 274-8811.

According to the city's collection schedule page, New Tampa residents are serviced through Hillsborough County Solid Waste Management, which takes schedule questions at (813) 272-5680. The department's other work includes neighborhood cleanups for 37 weeks of the year, refuse collection at all major City of Tampa events, appliance pickups, roll-off and compactor service and collection of illegally dumped waste. The city's recycling page, updated September 10, 2026, lists Larry Washington as Solid Waste Director, with the department at 4010 West Spruce Street.

Tampa collects blue garbage carts twice a week and green recycling carts and yard waste once a week.

The city states that blue cart garbage service is provided twice per week for all City of Tampa utility customers, while green cart recycling and yard waste are each collected once weekly. Carts should be at the curb no later than 6:00 a.m. on collection day, unblocked and 3 feet apart from other carts or obstacles. Collection runs throughout the day and may go into the evening, and the schedule page says carts must be removed by sunset to a spot not visible from the street; the city's residential trash page says the night before is also acceptable for setting out and asks that carts be removed by the end of the service day.

The trash rules require all trash to go inside the blue cart with the lid closed and no garbage extending out. The recycling page notes that, unlike garbage, the green recycling cart can wait until it is full before going to the curb. Tampa residents can look up pickup days by address on the city site, and the city points residents to the Tampa Trash and Recycling App for questionable items; the department's timeline dates the app to 2021.

Tampa recycling goes loose in one green cart, and only items on the city's accepted list should go in it.

The department switched to single-stream residential recycling in 2008. The recycling program rules say items must be larger than the size of a fist, rinsed, empty or dry as appropriate, and free and loose, because bagged material will not be recycled. The city tells residents to use its accepted items list rather than the plastic resin number, since not all items marketed as recyclable are accepted locally in Tampa.

The recycling FAQs explain that Tampa can accept only items listed by its contracted processor, WM, and that the list depends on contractor technology, product quality and market availability, so it can change annually with Material Recovery Facility contract renewals. Caps, lids, plastic utensils, straws and shredded paper are not accepted, because small items fall through the sorting equipment with the recyclable glass and contaminate it. Liquid and food residue can cause an entire truck load to be rejected by the contractor and treated as garbage, and households that do not comply with the rules are subject to cart removal.

Residents with extra material can use the self-service recycling drop-off station at the McKay Bay Waste Management Resource Facility, open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Wednesday and Saturday from 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., closed Sunday. All cardboard there must be folded and flattened and placed inside the container.

Tampa yard waste must go out in paper bags, non-city cans or jute-tied bundles, and bulky items go through the city's yearly bulk pickup program or the McKay Bay Scale House.

As of February 1, 2024, the Tampa city no longer accepts yard waste in plastic bags of any kind, so that all of it can be composted. Accepted containers are non-city garbage carts (32 gallons recommended), paper yard waste bags or bundles tied with jute twine, with no item over 50 pounds and limbs and logs in 4-foot lengths. Yard waste is not permitted in the blue or green city carts. Each household may set out up to 4 cubic yards on its scheduled yard waste day, and landscaping companies are required to haul away the yard waste their work creates.

Bulky items move through S.W.E.E.P., the Solid Waste Enhanced Environmental Program. The program gives residential customers in single-family homes and properties of four units or less one prescheduled collection every year at no additional cost. Accepted items include appliances, furniture, mattresses, barbecue grills, toilets, carpet and up to four passenger tires, placed in one curbside pile no later than 8 p.m. on the assigned Sunday and no earlier than five days before it. Piles should not exceed 10 cubic yards. Off-schedule special pickups cost $18.12 per cubic yard, a cubic yard being about the size of an oven. S.W.E.E.P. collections are not provided in New Tampa.

The McKay Bay Scale House at 114 South 34th Street takes appliances (two per visit), barbecue grills, furniture, mattresses and yard waste in paper bags or jute bundles free from Tampa residents who bring government identification and proof of an active City of Tampa solid waste account in the same name. Construction debris, household garbage, mixed loads, carpet and tires are paid disposal, by credit card only. For paint, chemicals and electronics, the city has contracted with Hillsborough County so Tampa residents can use county household hazardous waste and electronics sites for no additional charge with a valid driver's license.

Tampa sends all garbage collected in city limits, excluding recyclables, to its own McKay Bay waste-to-energy complex, where it is burned to make electricity.

The department states that one hundred percent of the waste collected within city limits, excluding recyclables, is disposed of at the McKay Bay Waste Management Resource Facility, a complex of the Waste-to-Energy Facility, the Transfer Station and the Scale House, all owned and operated by the City of Tampa. According to the city's McKay Bay page, the plant helps Tampa manage over 360,000 tons of trash a year and converts it into electricity for up to 15,000 Tampa homes each month. That page lists resident drop-off hours of 8:00 a.m. to noon, Monday through Saturday, which differ from the longer hours on the city's Scale House and drop-off station listings, so residents should confirm before driving to McKay Bay.

The city's facility overview says the process reduces landfill waste by 90 percent, that Seminole Electric Cooperative buys the power and the money helps pay for disposal costs, and that metal is recovered from facility ash. Tampa is investing $91.5 million in McKay Bay improvements beginning February 2024, covering boiler systems, the turbine generator, cranes and the tipping floor, cooling towers and air pollution control technology. A 53,000-square-foot transfer station, unveiled in 2022 according to the department timeline, sits beside a new drop-off area for city residents.

Tampa's city trash service dates to 1927, when the city established a Sanitation Department for all residential and commercial customers.

The city timeline records that the Tampa incinerator was built in 1967; until then collection was largely manual and disposal was primarily by landfilling. The incinerator closed in 1979 and the McKay Bay Refuse-to-Energy Facility was built, beginning operation in 1985, and it received a complete retrofit in 1998 to meet air standards mandated by the EPA. The City of Tampa officially took over operations of the McKay Bay plant in 2020.

Collection was automated over two decades. In 2005 Tampa began a five-year transition to fully automated service, giving each household one blue 95-gallon cart and ordering automated trucks, and the switch was complete in 2010. Single-stream recycling followed in 2008, citywide automated carted recycling in 2013 and a green 95-gallon cart for every household by 2015, along with compressed natural gas trucks from 2013 and GPS and RFID technology from 2014. On the water, the Litter Skimmer trash boat, introduced in 2023, works a route from the Howard Frankland Bridge to the Tampa Overpass Canal in the east and the Hillsborough Dam in the north, and collects up to 39,000 pounds of trash a year.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by rechecking thirteen City of Tampa Solid Waste pages, among them the collection schedule, recycling rules and FAQs, yard waste, S.W.E.E.P., Scale House, McKay Bay and Litter Skimmer pages.