Greensboro, NC Trash & Recycling: Recycling Rules (2026)

City Code § 25-21(j) creates a specific fee for 'emptying a recycling dumpster as trash': $100 per dumpster, charged beginning with the second such collection and every one after that. The section defines 'trash' for this purpose as any item not included in the city's Recycle Greensboro program, meaning a container full of non-recyclable material gets treated, and billed, as ordinary refuse rather than processed as recycling. This fee sits in Article IV of Chapter 25 alongside the chapter's general enforcement mechanism in § 25-22: when a solid waste management official finds a violation of any chapter provision, including a contaminated recycling load, the owner or occupant gets notice by posted or hand-delivered notice and fourteen days to fix the problem before a civil penalty attaches.

If the violation isn't remedied, § 25-22(b) sets a $75 civil penalty per violation on top of any container-specific charge like the § 25-21(j) contamination fee, and a citation under § 25-22(c) gives the violator fifteen days to pay before the city can pursue collection as a civil debt under § 25-22(d). The contamination fee is separate from the cart roll-back fee in § 25-21(k), which charges $25 per occurrence, after one courtesy warning, for leaving a recycling or refuse container at the curb past the scheduled service day.

Together these fees are how the solid waste management division recovers the cost of a household or business repeatedly putting the wrong material in a recycling container instead of sorting it for the regular refuse stream.