St. Lucie County Landfill and Solid Waste

The St. Lucie County landfill is the Solid Waste Baling and Recycling Facility, a 331-acre county site at 6120 Glades Cut-Off Road, Fort Pierce, FL 34981, that takes in and processes solid waste from St. Lucie County homes and commercial properties.

The county Solid Waste Division page gives the facility's contact line as 772-462-1768 and its email as solidwaste@stlucieco.gov, and notes that landfill account holders have been able to pay their bills online through Forte since August 1, 2023, with their account number at hand. The same page links StLucieCountyRecycles.com, a county lookup tool for sorting out where a household item belongs.

Baling and recycling are the point of the design. The county's virtual tours page says the goal of the Baling and Recycling Facility is to recover as much recyclable material as possible before anything goes into the landfill, and credits those practices with adding years to the life of the landfill and making St. Lucie County and Port St. Lucie a greener community. The page offers a video tour of what it calls St. Lucie County's award winning landfill facility, and a second tour of the county's single stream recycling facility.

The Baling and Recycling Facility takes loads Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., with earlier scale cutoffs that depend on how the load is unloaded.

A driver unloading by hand has to reach the scale by 4:15 p.m. on a weekday, while a vehicle with pneumatic unloading equipment has until 4:45 p.m.; on Saturdays those cutoffs move to 12:15 p.m. and 12:45 p.m. The site does not open on Sundays, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day. On every other holiday it runs Saturday style hours of 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. with the same 12:15 p.m. and 12:45 p.m. cutoffs, and for questions on a Saturday or holiday the county lists a separate number, 772-462-1635 (St. Lucie County Solid Waste Division).

Drop-offs start at the Scale House. Arriving with household hazardous waste or recyclables, a driver heads straight in to the Scale House, pulls onto the scale closest to the building or window, tells the operator what is in the vehicle and is directed from there (county hazardous waste page). The county's single stream recycling page invites residents of buildings with no recycling service to bring recyclables to Glades Cut-Off Road the same way.

The Baling and Recycling Facility charges $79.00 a ton for Class 1 garbage and $25.00 a ton for clean wood, under rates effective February 1, 2025, with per item prices for tires and tanks.

Accepted payment is cash, major credit card or company check, and a company check must come with 2 forms of ID; personal checks are not accepted (county waste fees page). Landfill account holders may pay their bills through the Forte online payment service described on the Solid Waste Division page. The St. Lucie County guide to trash pickup in the unincorporated area covers curbside collection.

St. Lucie County residents may bring household hazardous waste, meaning products that are corrosive, flammable, reactive or toxic, to the Baling and Recycling Facility, and most of it is free except cylinder tanks.

For drop-offs at the Baling and Recycling Facility, the county's household hazardous waste page tells residents to look for the label words CAUTION, CORROSIVE, DANGER, FLAMMABLE, POISON or TOXIC, and not to put leftover products in a garbage or recycling cart, pour them down a drain or dump them on the ground, since careless disposal can injure sanitation workers and pollute air and water. Liquids are generally taken in containers of up to 5 gallons, and dry or granular products up to 100 pounds per household per day. Wet cell lead acid vehicle batteries and rechargeable batteries are on the accepted list, while ordinary single-use alkaline batteries may go in household garbage.

The free service is for households only. The same Fort Pierce facility page says businesses, which it defines to include local, state and federal government, schools, commercial, religious, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, must hire a licensed hazardous waste handler, as must residents whose hazardous waste is commercially generated. Waste from outside St. Lucie County, containers larger than 5 gallons, explosives, ammunition, fireworks, flares, radioactive waste including smoke alarms and detectors, and X-rays are all refused (St. Lucie County hazardous waste list). Latex paint is water based and not treated as hazardous, but it must be dried to a solid before it goes in the garbage.

Florida law bars lead-acid batteries, used oil and white goods from any landfill, including the one at the St. Lucie County Baling and Recycling Facility, and limits yard trash in lined Class I landfills.

For any landfill in Florida, Fort Pierce included, section 403.708(12), Florida Statutes says a person who knows or should know the nature of those wastes may not dispose of them in landfills, and requires every retailer that sells lead-acid batteries to accept used ones as trade-ins for new ones. Yard trash may not go into a lined Class I landfill unless the landfill runs an active gas collection system and makes beneficial use of the gas, although a Class I landfill may also accept yard trash to mulch it and use it as landfill cover.

Tires have their own statute. Under section 403.717, Florida Statutes, whole waste tires may not be deposited in a landfill as a method of ultimate disposal, although the Department of Environmental Protection's rules must authorize final disposal of tires cut into sufficiently small parts at a permitted solid waste disposal facility and allow such material as daily landfill cover, and the department must encourage voluntary waste tire collection centers, open to the public, at solid waste disposal facilities and other sites. The same section bars anyone from contracting with a waste tire collector unless the collector is registered with the department or exempt. The Glades Cut-Off Road fee schedule lists tires on their own lines, by the piece for 1 to 5 tires with up to a 20 inch rim and by the ton for larger loads and bigger rims (county waste fees page).

On the St. Lucie County side, the Glades Cut-Off Road site prices yard waste and land clearing debris apart from Class 1 garbage, charges a flat $3.00 per load for scrap metal and white goods (county waste fees page), and accepts vehicle batteries and motor oil, in containers of 5 gallons or less and no more than three 5 gallon containers per household per day, through its household hazardous waste program (county hazardous waste page).

Last verified: October 22, 2026, by rereading the St. Lucie County Solid Waste Division, waste fees, household hazardous waste, virtual tours and single stream recycling pages and sections 403.708 and 403.717 of the Florida Statutes for the Glades Cut-Off Road facility.