5 things Milwaukee bulk pickup won't take

Before the list: check your own municipality

There is no single set of bulk rules across this metro. The City of Milwaukee, Wauwatosa, West Allis, Greenfield, Shorewood, Cudahy, Oak Creek and every other community set their own — different schedules, different quantity limits, different exclusions. Check your own municipality's current collection page before you carry anything out.

What follows are the five categories that are most commonly restricted across the metro, in the order we get called about them. If your item is on this list, assume the alley is not the answer until your own community tells you otherwise.

And one thing that is true everywhere: an item put out and not collected is a nuisance complaint filed against the property address, not against whoever left it.

1. Mattresses and box springs

The single most restricted household item in this metro, and the one most often left standing in an alley.

Where programs do accept them, they usually attach conditions — a schedule, a quantity limit, and increasingly a requirement that the mattress be wrapped or bagged in plastic before it goes out. Check whether yours does; if it is required and you skip it, the mattress stays put.

The Milwaukee complication is weather. A mattress left out absorbs an astonishing amount of rain or snowmelt within a day or two, at which point it is heavier, unmistakably ruined, and more likely to be refused. Between October and May that is close to a certainty.

What to do instead: twin $82, full $94, queen $103, king $114, box spring $92, or the mattress and box spring together as a set for $143. Booking them separately would be $103 + $92 = $195 for a queen set, so the set price saves $195 − $143 = $52.

2. Anything containing refrigerant

Refrigerators, freezers, window and portable air conditioners, dehumidifiers, outdoor condensers and heat pumps. These are handled separately from general household waste because federal rules require the refrigerant to be recovered by trained technicians before the unit is processed.

This category is enormous in Milwaukee, for two specific reasons. First, the second refrigerator and the chest freezer in the basement are close to standard equipment in this city — and when one dies, it stays there. Second, so much of the older housing never got central air, so households run three or four window units, swap them out every autumn like the storm windows, and stack the dead ones in the basement or the alley garage.

What to do instead: refrigerator $164, side-by-side or French door $183, mini fridge $115, chest freezer $146, upright freezer $149, small window AC $87, large window AC $109, portable AC $85, outdoor condenser $115, dehumidifier $77. Refrigerant recovery is included in all of those — there is no separate fee.

The classic basement pair, the dead beer fridge and the chest freezer, is $164 + $146 = $310.

3. Televisions, monitors and computers

Electronics are handled differently from ordinary household waste in Wisconsin. A television is not an alley item, and a TV put out with the bulk will generally still be there afterwards.

The Milwaukee version of this problem is the CRT — the deep boxy set, or the wood-console television on legs — that went into a basement or an attic half-story when flat screens arrived and has been there ever since, because it weighs as much as the person who would have to carry it up.

What to do instead: TV under 42 inches $62, 42 to 65 inches $68, over 65 inches $73, computer monitor $58, and a box of electronics — cables, routers, consoles, DVD players — for $77. Measure the diagonal of the screen, not the cabinet, and factory reset anything smart before it goes.

Retailer take-back programs and periodic community collection events are the free routes. Both have size and quantity limits, and both require you to have already carried the thing out of the basement.

4. Construction and renovation debris

Bulk collection is for household goods. It is not for the drywall, lath, plaster, tile, cabinets and old fixtures that come out of a remodel — and in this city's housing stock those are heavy, dusty and voluminous.

Milwaukee renovations produce a specific kind of debris. Pulling plaster and wood lath off a bungalow wall generates far more weight and mess than tearing out modern drywall. Old cast iron fixtures, a cast iron radiator abandoned during a heating conversion, cream city brick from a chimney breast, a concrete pad in the back yard — none of it is a bulk item and all of it is heavy.

What to do instead: construction debris $120, concrete or masonry debris $219 per quarter truck, contractor bag $41, cast iron radiator $123, cast iron bathtub $185, fiberglass bathtub $90, detached toilet $64, bathroom vanity $69, laminate countertop section $56, stone or granite countertop section $111.

A small bathroom gut: cast iron bathtub $185, toilet $64 and vanity $69, which is $185 + $64 + $69 = $318.

5. Paint, solvents and household hazardous waste

No collection program takes these, and no junk hauler can either — including us. It is the one category where the answer is genuinely a different service.

Every Milwaukee basement and every alley garage has the shelf: half-used tins of paint and stain going back decades, thinner, varnish, a can of motor oil, antifreeze, weed killer, an ancient gas can. It is a fixture of long-tenure houses in this city and it comes up in nearly every basement clear-out we quote.

What to do instead: these go through your county's household hazardous waste program. Check the current arrangements for your county rather than relying on what someone remembers from a few years ago — sites, hours and accepted materials change.

Also in this bucket: propane tanks, which go back to an exchange point; car batteries and tires, handled under their own rules; medical sharps, which need a specialist route; and ammunition, which turns up in Wisconsin basements more often than people expect — contact your local police non-emergency line for the correct procedure.

Set all of it aside in one corner before a cleanout and we will clear everything around it.

The honourable mention: anything that is upstairs

Not a rule so much as the practical reality that defeats bulk collection in Milwaukee more than any exclusion list.

Every free route — municipal collection, donation, a neighbor taking it, a recycling drop-off — assumes the item is already outside. In this city it usually is not. It is in the upper unit of a two-flat at the top of an enclosed rear staircase that turns ninety degrees on a landing. It is in a bungalow attic half-story up a steep, narrow stair. It is at the bottom of a basement with a low header at the top of the steps, or at the back of a detached garage the length of the yard from the alley.

That carry is the job. A flat-price pickup is a carry-out price — no stair charge, no long-carry charge, no no-driveway charge. Minimum per visit is $75, and for anything room-sized volume pricing usually beats itemizing: a quarter truck is $241, a half truck is $431, a full truck is $732.

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