Covert dumping issues
 

Yesterday my son and I ripped up the old ceramic tile floor on our kitchen as another phase of the remodeling project. I hated that floor, almost white so it showed every bit of dirt tracked in and the grout was not sealed right so it was dark and dirty.

My Makita rotary hammer made quick work of it and we put a big box fan in one window and opened the others which kept it pretty much dust free. We filled up heavy duty cardboard boxes with the broken tile and grout just heavy enough not to break them. I have 18 boxes!

Now I am in search of a covert dumping spot since my trash guys won't touch construction and demo waste without a large extra charge. I usually find dumpsters behind business for light construction stuff but ideally for this waste I would like to find a construction project where they will be regrading everything eventually. That way it's just like the rocks already there and gets plowed under the ground. I found one such spot yesterday and turned out the contents of 6 boxes, however I prefer to not use the same spot twice so I am out searching my area. And I don't dump the boxes, that would be littering, I take them home for the regular trash. I do have principles!

I will probably have to rent a diamond concrete grinder from HD, to get the thinset up; they run about $100 per day and you wet the floor down to avoid a dust bomb and then wet vac it all up. Walking barefoot on old thinset is no fun.

Here in Arlington VA, they have an inert trash dump, where you can drop off tile, brick, concrete, etc, and they grind it up and use it for pavement or something. You have to be a county resident and can only make one free drop off per month. They record your vehicle license plate number in a binder.

Houston must have something similar?

Edit: I was curious, so I looked up the Houston rules. Looks like they have no legal solution for you. I would never urge you to break the law, but if they don't provide a legal path, then who can blame you for dealing with it the best way you know how?

... and we bitch about Halliburton and fracking and BP and...

CIH does have a legal way to dispose of the stuff.
It just costs him some $, but he doesn't want to pay for it.

ok, so your thread title is covert dumping.... and i open the thread to find a lad squatting in a corner.

did you do that on purpose?

OK, you guys got me going...

I had researched this in the past and was told that the city of Houston will not take any inert material like tile, cement or bricks. And my trash service charges $125 for a dumpster for this kind of stuff.

So thanks to glatt's suggestion I called the county landfill that services my area's trash companies and was told that if the tile is separate from any other construction trash they will take it for free as they crush it up for road building.

This solves my problem! :cheerldr:

Excellent!

Beats illegal dumping, by a damn sight.

I spend a lot of time in the country/woods/riverbanks, and it never ceases to piss me off when I come across a site where some jerk was to lazy/cheap to dump his shit somewhere legal/intended for such.

Any construction site would probably let you do a one time dumpster deposit. If'n ya ask nice like.

I agree, but government has to make it relatively easy to do legally. Around here, you have to pay $10 to have an old CRT television picked up for trash. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. That not a lot of money, but a lot of people just dump them anyway. That pisses me off.

Downtown, there are very few public restrooms, so the homeless piss on the sidewalks. Every morning, the businesses are out there with hoses, cleaning it up. I don't blame the homeless as much as I blame the government for not offering restrooms. I don't know where they go to take a shit. I don't see any shit on the sidewalks. A guy's gotta go to the bathroom, whether you make one available or not.

Just got back from the land fill and it was quite an adventure. I got weighed and as I did not have a yellow safety vest was issued a loaner. I was told to follow the road up the hill and look for where there was a lot of dumped concrete. The term "land fill" is a bit of a misnomer as it is more like "build a mountain out of trash and grow grass on it"

I motored up amongst the big boys in their Waste Management dump trucks of all kinds. Found a spot and dumped out all of my boxes.

Snapped this picture of my vehicle on Trash Mountain as a souvenir! :cool:

You got hella lights, yo.

And a snorkel. My vehicle actually looks a lot more like the ones you see in Australia than Texas.

oh I'd love to have a snorkel ... one day, the guy who owned the LR dealership in St John's had an old series 1 with a snorkel - then he bought himself a Defender - I think he only had the dealership to justify his 'toys' :)

Three other possibilities, which you don't now need.
1~ bury it in the yard.
2~ put a little in your trash each week, although that would take forever.
3~ put the boxes on the curb with a sign, For Sale $300, and wait for it to be stolen. :haha:

Good ideas. Nowhere to bury it here but I do use those super heavy Contractor trash bags for a lot of stuff. We tore out all of the sheetrock in the kitchen, walls and ceilings and I cut and broke it up and bagged it and each trash day put out 3-4 bags and pretty soon it was all gone. The trick is to not make them too heavy or have nails sticking out of the bags. I also took all of the wood scraps, molding and 2x4s I wasn't going to reuse as well as most of the upper cabinets plywood parts that we tore out and burned them in the fireplace over the winter on the cold nights. Made an awfully hot and bright fire!

And yes, people do take the funniest things out on the curb but probably not cement items. I once put a heavy steel auto floor jack that had a broken pump out on the curb and it was gone within a few hours.

We have a junk man who drives around on trash day in an old pick-up truck and he picks up all big metal items out of people's trash. I'm sure it's for scrap value. It must be worth his time and gas, but I can't imagine how.

Piles it up & takes it in when he has enough to make a lump in his pocket.

Scrap Aluminum is about 75 cents a pound and iron/steel 18 cents. Copper is $2.30 to $2.70 depending on what it is. He may also find other treasures in the trash... or work for the CIA/FBI. :eek:

If it's copper, then it's definitely worth it, but I thought iron wasn't worth enough to bother transporting. I don't know where the scrap metal place is, but I bet there is one within 30 miles of me. So let's say you have a truck that gets 11 MPG. That's going to take roughly 6 gallons round trip, or roughly $20. So he'd need 111 pounds to break even. I guess that's not so hard. A broken water heater or two, and you're there. In fact, if I had a truck, I might join in. This guy loads his pickup each trash day.

Nobody ever said he was smart, not like you expect most trash pickers to be.

But in reality, he probably has an MBA. You just don't understand his business model. ;)

Over the past 3 years I have replaced my old aluminum clad single pane windows with new double glass ones, I pay as I go so it's taking awhile. Most window companies do lousy work so I do my own and know my work is better.

I remove the old windows and then carefully remove the glass without smashing it up if possible or at least as little as I can. Later I use a glass cutter to get the big pieces down to smaller sizes and drop them at recycling and I take all of the extruded aluminum from the frames and take it to a metal recycler. Most if it is pitted and a bit dirty so I get .65/lb but so far I have paid for one of the replacement windows!

As far as trash pickers who profit from our throwaways, I think it is still very common in third world countries. My brother lived in India and saw that everything tossed out eventually got picked up.

When I was a kid and visited my British cousins who lived near Hampstead Heath (NW of London) in about 1962 I remember seeing a guy with a horse and wagon picking up stuff. My grandmother called him "the rag and bones man."

Hey, Sundae, do they still have those guys there? I bet not. :dedhorse: