Durham, NC Trash & Recycling: Holiday Pickup Schedule (2026)

Section 58-125(a) is the source of Durham's holiday-schedule flexibility: it puts collection schedules generally in the hands of the Director of Solid Waste, and gives the director or a designee explicit authority to alter those schedules to observe holidays or to meet emergency situations, such as severe weather. The ordinance itself sets no fixed list of observed holidays or a standard shift rule (like "one day later for the rest of the week"), that operational detail is left to the director's schedule-setting authority under this section and the broader rulemaking power in Section 58-2, which lets the director set rules on frequency of collection and location, subject to city manager approval. In practice, this means the governing legal authority for a holiday delay is the ordinance provision itself, while the actual calendar of which holidays shift pickup and by how many days is published administratively rather than fixed in the code text.

Section 58-125(b) covers an unrelated commercial threshold in the same section: businesses generating more than two cubic yards of refuse weekly, about four roll-out carts' worth, must install and maintain a stationary bulk refuse container rather than relying on cart pickup, tying back to the mandatory-container rules in Sections 58-65 and 58-66. As with holiday timing, failing to comply with a director-altered schedule or the container mandate is enforced through the same civil remedial-fee mechanism in Section 58-8 that governs the rest of Chapter 58, not through criminal citation.