Garbage and Recycling in Tampa — Tampa, Florida

Inside most of the city, trash pickup is a municipal service run by the City of Tampa Department of Solid Waste and Environmental Program Management. The department describes a 266-person team serving nearly 90,000 residential and commercial customers, and it handles 100 percent of residential garbage, yard waste and household recycling collection in its service area. Commercial service is split: the city collects for 65 percent of Tampa businesses and franchises the other 35 percent to private hauling companies. Customer questions go to the Tampa Utilities Call Center at (813) 274-8811.

One large neighborhood is an exception. According to the city's collection schedule page, New Tampa residents are serviced through Hillsborough County Solid Waste Management rather than the city. The department's other work includes neighborhood cleanups for 37 weeks of the year, collection at every major City of Tampa event, appliance pickups and roll-off and compactor service. As of October 2026 the city's recycling page lists Larry Washington as Solid Waste Director, with administration at 4010 West Spruce Street.

Tampa uses two city carts on separate schedules. The city states that blue garbage carts are collected twice per week for all City of Tampa utility customers, while green recycling carts and yard waste are each collected once a week. Carts must be at the curb by 6:00 a.m. on collection day, or set out the night before, with 3 feet of clearance from other carts, cars and obstacles. Trucks run throughout the day and sometimes into the evening, and carts must be pulled back by sunset to a spot not visible from the street.

The residential trash rules require every bag of garbage to go inside the blue cart with the lid closed and nothing sticking out. Unlike the blue cart, the green recycling cart can wait until it is full before going to the curb. Tampa residents can look up their pickup days by address on the city site or in the Tampa Trash and Recycling App, which the department introduced in 2021.

Tampa runs single-stream recycling, meaning all accepted materials share one green cart. The recycling program rules set three preparation steps: items must be larger than a fist, rinsed, empty or dry as appropriate, and placed loose rather than bagged, because bagged material will not be recycled. The city tells residents to rely on its accepted items list rather than the resin number printed on plastic, since not every product marketed as recyclable is accepted in Tampa.

The list is set by the processor. 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 demand, so it can change each year when Material Recovery Facility contracts renew. Caps, lids, plastic utensils, straws and shredded paper are not accepted because small pieces fall through sorting equipment and contaminate the glass. Food or liquid residue can cause a whole truckload to be rejected by the contractor and handled as garbage, and households that keep misusing the cart 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 am to 5:30 pm and Wednesday and Saturday from 7:00 am to 3:30 pm, closed Sunday. Cardboard there must be folded flat and placed inside the dumpsters.

Tampa's yard waste rules changed in 2024. Since February 1, 2024, the 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 cans, ideally 32 gallons, paper yard waste bags or bundles tied with jute twine, with no single item over 50 pounds and limbs cut to 4-foot lengths. Each household may set out up to 4 cubic yards on its weekly yard waste day, and landscaping companies must haul away the yard waste they create.

Bulky items move through S.W.E.E.P., the Solid Waste Enhanced Environmental Program. The program gives single-family homes and properties of four units or less one prescheduled bulk collection each year at no additional cost. Items such as furniture, mattresses, appliances, grills and up to four passenger tires must be in one curbside pile by 8 p.m. on the assigned Sunday, and 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. does not operate in New Tampa.

Other options run through the McKay Bay complex and Hillsborough County. The McKay Bay Scale House takes appliances (two per visit), barbecue grills, furniture, mattresses and yard waste in paper bags or jute bundles free from residents who bring ID and proof of an active City of Tampa solid waste account, while construction debris, carpet, tires and household garbage are paid loads. For paint, chemicals and electronics, the city has contracted with Hillsborough County so Tampa residents can use county household hazardous waste sites at no extra charge.

Tampa burns its trash rather than burying it. 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 turns it into electricity for up to 15,000 Tampa homes each month.

The city's facility overview says burning reduces the volume headed to landfill by 90 percent, that Seminole Electric Cooperative buys the power, and that metal is recovered from the ash. Tampa is investing $91.5 million in McKay Bay upgrades that began in February 2024, covering boilers, the turbine generator, cranes and the tipping floor, cooling towers and air pollution controls. A 53,000 square foot transfer station, unveiled in 2022, sorts and stages incoming waste beside a new resident drop-off area.

The city timeline traces the system to 1927, when Tampa established a Sanitation Department for all residential and commercial customers. A Tampa incinerator built in 1967 ended a long reliance on landfilling; it closed in 1979, and its replacement, the McKay Bay Refuse-to-Energy Facility, began operating in 1985 and received an EPA-required retrofit in 1998. The city took over operation of the McKay Bay plant in 2020.

Collection itself was automated over two decades. Starting in 2005 Tampa gave each household one blue 95-gallon cart and ordered automated trucks, finishing the switch in 2010. Single-stream recycling followed in 2008, citywide automated carted recycling in 2013 and green 95-gallon carts for every household by 2015, along with compressed natural gas trucks from 2013 and GPS and RFID tracking from 2014. On the water, the Litter Skimmer boat, launched in 2023, works a route from the Howard Frankland Bridge to the Hillsborough Dam and collects up to 39,000 pounds of floating trash a year.