Where renovation waste actually goes in Ottawa.

The City of Ottawa is direct about this one. Plaster, wood including pressure-treated lumber, drywall, concrete, asphalt and other waste from building, renovating or demolishing are not collected with regular garbage, and the City says to bring the material to the Trail Road Landfill Site or another landfill. So the real question for anyone mid-renovation is not whether the curb will take it. It will not. The question is what the trip costs, and that turns almost entirely on how the load is sorted before it goes on the scale. At the City's own 2026 rates, clean fill is $144 a tonne and a load that mixes garbage with recyclable material is $345.40 a tonne. Same trip, same scale, more than double the bill.

Sorting is the whole cost, not the trip.

Most people budget a renovation disposal run as a single line: rent something, fill it, pay the tip fee. The scale house does not see it that way. It prices what you actually brought, and the categories are far apart.

The City's 2026 rates at the Trail Waste Facility put clean fill, meaning asphalt, masonry and concrete without rebar, at $144 a tonne, with a $36 minimum for anything under 250 kg. Residential garbage, which the City's own table says includes construction material from the home owner, is $172.70 a tonne with a flat $43.20 minimum under 250 kg. Soil, sand and sod are cheaper again at $81.90 a tonne. A load of mixed garbage and recyclable materials is $345.40 a tonne.

Read those four numbers next to each other and the lesson is obvious. The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive category is not a small premium for convenience. It is the difference between one bill and two and a half of them, decided before you ever left the driveway.

The qualifiers matter as much as the rates. Fill has to be free of waste including metal, so one length of rebar left in a chunk of concrete moves that load out of the $144 category. Soil has to be free of waste too. These are not technicalities the scale house waives.

What the curb will not take, and what the City says instead.

The City's special items page names the materials explicitly: plaster, wood including pressure-treated lumber, drywall, concrete and asphalt, or other waste resulting from building construction, renovation or demolition. None of it goes out with the household garbage.

Appliances are a separate refusal with a separate reason. The City does not pick up stoves, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, dryers, dishwashers, hot water tanks, furnaces or oil tanks at the curb at all, and says residents must make their own arrangements. For anything with a cooling circuit, a fridge, a freezer, an air conditioner or a dehumidifier, there is an extra step: the cooling chemicals have to be removed and the unit tagged before a landfill will accept it, and the City states that untagged units are refused entry to the site.

That last detail catches people out on the day. A basement fridge loaded into a trailer with the rest of the demolition can turn a booked disposal run into a wasted morning, because the refusal happens at the gate rather than in advance.

The old windows are a safety problem.

Renovations produce a lot of glass, and it is the one material where the City's instruction is about the person handling it rather than about the landfill.

For the health and safety of waste collectors, the City asks that glass items are packaged securely in a cardboard box and the box labelled glass, so the operator knows what is in it before lifting it into the truck. That covers window panes, mirrors, dishes and light bulbs.

It costs a marker and thirty seconds, and the person it protects is the one who cannot see inside the bag.

How to plan the load before anything gets loaded.

Decide the categories before demolition starts, not after, because separating a pile is far harder than never mixing it.

Keep clean concrete, brick and asphalt in their own pile, and pull the rebar and any other metal out as you go rather than at the scale. Keep soil and sod separate from everything. Everything else from the build, the drywall, the plaster, the lumber, the underlay, is the general construction stream and goes as residential garbage. Set appliances aside entirely and deal with each on its own terms, since the City does not collect any of them at the curb.

The City also runs a Waste Explorer lookup for individual items, which is the quickest way to settle an argument about one specific thing rather than guessing. And the City's page names Waste Management and Tomlinson as companies offering programs that recycle some construction and renovation materials, noting that residents have to phone ahead.

If none of that appeals, that is the work we do. Ottawa Site Restoration handles demolition, junk removal and the post-construction clean afterwards, which means the sorting, the loading and the trips to the right destination are ours rather than yours.

Sources

• City of Ottawa, Rates for the Trail Waste Facility Landfill read 2026-09-10
• City of Ottawa, Special items read 2026-09-10

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Page last updated July 23, 2026