Local Rules

Stickers, Seasons and Prepaid Brush Piles

Two weeks in spring and eight in autumn, the stickers are free. Almost nobody knows that.

Two systems, not one

Moline handles green waste in two entirely separate ways, and mixing them up is where the money goes.

• Bagged yard waste — leaves, grass, garden refuse. Paper bags or a City cart, with a sticker.
• Brush and limbs — a completely different arrangement, free if bundled, prepaid by the cubic yard if not.

Both are collected on your regular garbage day, and both run seasonally rather than year-round. Neither goes in your garbage cart.

Bagged yard waste and the $2 sticker

The rules are specific and the City enforces them by simply not collecting non-compliant material.

Two things people get wrong. The bags must be paper and biodegradable — plastic sacks of leaves are not collected, whatever is on them. And the 30-gallon limit is a real limit; the oversized paper bags sold for construction debris are not yard waste bags.

If you do a lot of garden work, the $7 cart is usually better value than buying stickers week after week. Worth doing the arithmetic at the start of a season rather than the end.

⚠️ The two free sticker windows

This is the most useful thing on the page and almost nobody knows it.

Those windows exist for the obvious reason: spring clean-up and leaf fall are when the volume arrives, and charging per bag then would put material in the wrong places.

What that means if you can plan:

• Time a big garden clear-out to the windows. An autumn tidy-up in late October costs nothing in stickers; the same work in July costs $2 a bag.
• Leaf season is entirely free for bagged material. There is no reason to pay.
• Check the current year's dates. They shift, and the City publishes them.

We would genuinely rather tell you this than rent you a container for leaves.

Bundled brush is free; unbundled is not

Brush works on a completely different basis, and it is the one that surprises people with a bill.

Bundled brush is collected on your regular garbage day at no extra charge.

Unbundled brush and larger piles require prepayment, and the pricing is by volume:

• $30 for the first 2.5 cubic yards
• $40 for each additional 2.5 cubic yards

Paid in advance at the Moline Finance Office, or by calling 309.524.2070. There is no limit on the size of the pile — you can have as much as you like, provided you have paid for it.

Note the shape of that pricing: the first increment is $30 and every one after is $40. It does not get cheaper with volume, it gets slightly more expensive. That matters when a tree comes down.

Rough arithmetic worth doing: a single mature tree taken down and left unbundled runs to a great many cubic yards. At $40 per 2.5 after the first, the prepayment on a serious tree job climbs past what a container costs surprisingly fast — and a container takes the stumps and the treated timber that brush collection will not.

The 4-inch branch rule

One hard limit that applies regardless of bundling or payment.

Anything thicker is not brush as far as the City is concerned, and it will be left. That is not arbitrary — the compost facility at the landfill runs a grinder with a 3 inch diameter capability, so oversized wood genuinely cannot be processed through the green route.

The City also asks that piles be stacked neatly, not under low wires and not next to trees or poles. That is about the grapple truck being able to reach it, and it is worth taking seriously — a pile under a wire does not get lifted.

For anything over 4 inches: trunk sections, stumps, split rounds. Those need a container, or splitting for firewood, or a tree service that takes it away as part of the job. Ask the arborist before they leave.

The cart rules people fall foul of

Short, specific, and each one is a reason a cart gets skipped:

• Out by 6:30 a.m. on collection day, at the designated point.
• Lids must be closed. An overfull cart with the lid propped is not collected.
• Three feet of clearance around each cart — from parked cars, utility poles and mailboxes.
• Waste piled on the ground around the cart will not be taken unless it is arranged the way the City describes.
• No dirt, sod or rock in the cart.

That last one catches every landscaping project. Soil and sod are heavy, they are not yard waste, and they are one of the more common reasons a small garden job needs a container it was not expecting.

Recycling, separately, is single stream and every other week. Which week is yours is written on your cart lid — it says either white or maroon. A genuinely sensible bit of design.

The drop-off option

Moline residents can take refuse or yard waste directly to the drop-off site at the Upper Rock Island County Landfill, 17201 20th Avenue North, East Moline, for a per-load fee of roughly $25 to $29 per pickup-truck-size load plus tax. Proof of Moline residency is required.

We quote that as a range deliberately: the City publishes slightly different figures on different pages, so check the current rate before you drive out. The landfill is open Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

For one truckload this is a good option and cheaper than anything we can offer. For a project that produces five or six loads, the arithmetic and the time both go the other way.

When a container is the cheaper answer

• A tree down. Prepaid brush at $40 per 2.5 cubic yards after the first adds up fast, and the container takes the trunk sections too.
• Anything over 4 inches thick. The green route simply will not take it.
• Landscape rebuilds, which mix green waste with soil, sod, treated timber and hardscape — none of which belong in the yard waste stream.
• Work outside the season. Collection stops in mid December and does not resume until late March.
• Storm damage, which arrives all at once and does not wait for a collection day.
• Acreage work out toward Orion and Geneseo, where there is simply more of everything.

If you book a container for green waste, keep it clean and tell us that is what it is. A load of pure brush has a cheaper route than the same load with fence panels and pots in it — and nearly all exterior timber is treated, which puts it outside the clean stream entirely.