Glendale, CA Trash & Recycling: Holiday Pickup Schedule (2026)

Section 8.44.040 governs Glendale's minimum collection schedule, the backstop that keeps refuse, recyclables and organic material from piling up long enough to become a nuisance under the accumulation limits set in § 8.44.030: refuse can't sit out more than one calendar week, and organics or recyclables no more than fifteen days. Four circumstances excuse the city or its franchised hauler from meeting that normal seven-day cycle. A labor strike is one. Severe weather or an "Act of God" that makes collection impossible with normal equipment is a second. The one residents notice most often, subsection C, is a designated official city holiday interrupting the regular weekly cycle: when that happens, the code allows collection to be "postponed until the next working day" rather than skipped or moved earlier. The fourth basis runs the other direction: the director of public works can order more frequent removal than the standard schedule if needed to protect public health.

Because the holiday exception only lets pickup slide to the next working day, a Monday holiday pushes that week's collection to Tuesday, and a week containing two observed holidays can shift the remaining routes similarly. The rule doesn't specify which days are official holidays; that list lives in the city's separate holiday schedule and is published on the city's collection calendar each year. Residents whose refuse accumulates past the § 8.44.030 limit because of a holiday delay are not in violation, since § 8.44.040 exists precisely to excuse that circumstance while still capping how long the delay can run, to the very next working day, not an open-ended postponement.