Tulare County, CA Trash & Recycling: Recycling Requirements (2026)

Recycling in the unincorporated area is mandated by the County's Mandatory Organic Waste Disposal Reduction Ordinance (County Code Chapter 4-3, Article 13), which the County adopted to implement California's SB 1383 (Short-Lived Climate Pollutants Act, Statutes 2016) and AB 1826 commercial-recycling requirements. Section 4-03-1620 authorizes the Solid Waste Director to implement and enforce the SB 1383 Regulations (14 CCR section 18982 et seq.). Section 4-03-1635 requires single-family organic-waste generators to subscribe to the County's three-container service and place source-separated recyclable materials in the blue container; section 4-03-1640 makes each commercial generator (including multifamily dwellings of five or more units, and smaller multifamily dwellings that share containers under one subscription) responsible for compliance and automatically enrolls them in three-container service with a source-separated recycling level. The cart rules are explicit: the blue container is provided solely for recyclables and no organic waste or non-recyclable material is permitted in it; the gray container is for nonorganic trash only; the green container is for source-separated organics only. The county's solid-waste program notes AB 1826 requires businesses generating four or more cubic yards of waste weekly to recycle, and that multifamily complexes of five-plus units must recycle. Self-haulers may instead meet the requirements of section 4-03-1665.