Marin County, CA Trash & Recycling: Collection Schedule (2026)

110(A) makes county-franchised collection the exclusive way solid waste, recyclables and organic waste move out of the unincorporated area: no person may collect, handle, transfer, store, process, transport or use that material there without first entering into a franchise agreement with the county. Rather than set out a fixed weekly pickup calendar in the code itself, the county delegates day-to-day scheduling to its franchised hauler, whose contract fixes the routes and days each neighborhood is served, while the ordinance guarantees residents that only one accountable, county-regulated company runs those routes.

Subsection (B) lists ten narrow exceptions to the franchise requirement: haulers already franchised by a special district; residents, farms and businesses hauling their own waste with their own trucks and containers; contractors, gardeners, landscapers and cleanup services hauling waste generated while performing their own work; construction and demolition debris haulers; buyers of source-separated recyclables who pay the generator or charge no fee and keep at least 90 percent of the material out of the landfill; household hazardous and infectious waste; materials from schools, universities and other government facilities with their own separate collection arrangements; thrift-store donations; bulky items a retailer removes when delivering a replacement; and food donated to a food recovery organization.

Outside those carve-outs, hiring an unfranchised hauler to pick up trash in unincorporated Marin is itself a code violation, separate from any container or sorting violation.