Carteret County, NC Trash & Recycling: Recycling Rules (2026)

Sec. 14-30, titled Recyclables, states that containers at the county's convenience and recycling sites shall be designated for the deposit of acceptable recyclable materials, and that once recyclable materials are placed inside the appropriate container they become the property of the county or its designee by contract. That ownership shift matters for the scavenging rules elsewhere in Chapter 14: because deposited recyclables belong to the county, removing them afterward is treated as unauthorized salvaging. Sec. 14-29, Deposit of materials in containers, requires all items to be placed inside the appropriate container, and specifically requires that materials such as cardboard boxes and other packaging be reduced to their smallest volume by bending, breaking and compressing before they go into the container, so a single load does not fill a bin's capacity prematurely.

Read together with Sec. 14-31, industrial wastes may not be deposited at the container sites at all and must instead go to the transfer station or a private industrial container, keeping the recycling containers reserved for household-scale recyclable material. These rules apply at the same convenience and recycling container sites established under Sec. 14-28 for the unincorporated county, and enforcement runs through the general Chapter 14 scheme: violations, including scavenging previously deposited recyclables or dumping unauthorized materials in a recycling container, are cited under Sec. 14-4 and penalized under Sec. 14-5.