Gilroy, CA Trash & Recycling: Bin Placement Rules (2026)

Section 12.18 puts the duty to provide and maintain garbage receptacles on every owner, tenant, lessee, or occupant of a private dwelling, and on the proprietor, manager, owner, or lessee of any hotel, restaurant, cafe, boardinghouse, rooming house, or other public place of business in Gilroy. The receptacle itself has to be a standard thirty- or thirty-two-gallon plastic or metal garbage can with a cover, loaded no heavier than fifty pounds, or an approved garbage and rubbish bin, and it has to hold everything the property produces between one collection and the next.

Placement is specific: receptacles go in the alley behind the premises if there is alley access, or on the front curb if there is not, or at another spot the director of public works or the garbage contractor approves, positioned so the collector can reach and empty it without difficulty. Two things are flatly barred regardless of where a property sits: the receptacle can never be placed within the limits of any street, and it can never be positioned or left in a state that amounts to a nuisance.

The section requires the receptacle to be kept in a sanitary condition at all times, not just on pickup day, which ties § 12.18 to the health-officer inspection power in § 12.2 and the nuisance declarations elsewhere in Chapter 12 for accumulated garbage and rubbish. Where a dispute arises over exactly where a receptacle should sit awaiting pickup, § 12.17 gives the health officer final say over the placement, and that decision is not subject to further appeal within the Code.