Five things Boston bulk pickup will not take

Before the list: check your own city

There is no single Boston-area bulk pickup. Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Medford, Quincy and Newton each run their own collection with their own rules, their own days and their own exclusions, and those get revised. Your neighbor three stops down the Red Line is not under the same regime you are.

So read your own municipality's current bulky-item page before anything goes out. What follows is the pattern — the five categories that get refused across the metro, again and again, regardless of which city you are in.

1. Mattresses and box springs

Massachusetts restricts mattress disposal. They do not travel with ordinary household trash, and municipal programs across the metro handle them separately when they handle them at all — often on a request basis, often with conditions about wrapping or timing.

This is the single most-left item in Boston. Every September the sidewalks of Allston, Brighton and Mission Hill fill with mattresses that were put out on the assumption that a truck would come, and a lot of them are still there days later, rained on and a good deal heavier.

Removal: twin $111, full $126, queen $139, king $154. A box spring is $124, or $192 for the mattress-and-box-spring set together.

2. Televisions, monitors and electronics

Massachusetts keeps televisions and monitors out of the ordinary trash stream too. A set left with the regular trash is generally not being collected, and the older glass-tube televisions sitting in half the triple-decker basements in this city are exactly the ones the restriction exists for.

The practical failure mode is that the TV goes out, does not get taken, gets rained on, and then genuinely cannot be reused or easily processed. A wet television is worth less to everyone than a dry one.

Removal: under 42" $84, 42-65" $91, 65"+ $98, computer monitor $78, desktop tower $83, box of assorted electronics $104.

3. Anything with a sealed refrigerant system

Refrigerators, freezers, window air conditioners, portable AC units, dehumidifiers and mini fridges all contain refrigerant and a compressor full of oil. That is not household bulky waste and it needs recovering properly rather than being crushed in a truck body.

In Boston the volume here is seasonal and enormous. Very little of the older housing stock has central air, so window units go in every May and come out every October, and each fall a wave of dead ones appears on back porches and basement floors across Dorchester, Brighton, Somerville and East Boston.

Removal: refrigerator $221, side-by-side or french door $246, mini fridge $155, chest freezer $196, upright freezer $201, window AC $117 or $147 by size, portable AC $114, dehumidifier $104. There is no refrigerant fee on any of those.

4. Renovation and construction debris

No municipal bulky collection in this metro is a construction waste service. Ripped-out kitchen cabinets, drywall, tile, subfloor, old windows, a cast iron radiator from a heating conversion — none of that is household waste, and the general principle across the region is that debris from work done on a property is the property owner's to dispose of.

Boston generates a lot of it. Gut renovations of South End and Back Bay brownstones, triple-decker kitchen and bath rip-outs, three-family conversions in Dorchester and Roxbury, and the steady replacement of oil and gas systems with heat pumps, which leaves an old boiler or furnace sitting in a basement.

Removal: construction debris $162, a full kitchen cabinet rip-out $395, a stone countertop section $150, drywall $50 a sheet or small bundle, cast iron radiator $165, furnace $176, tank water heater $176, empty oil tank $620. Concrete and masonry is priced separately at $295 per quarter truck because of the weight.

5. Anything that is not already at the curb

This is the one people forget, and in Boston it is the one that actually decides things. Municipal crews collect from the curbside. They do not come up three flights of triple-decker back stairs, they do not come into a South End brownstone, and they do not go down into a basement.

Which means a bulk collection is only useful to you if you can already get the item outside. For a lot of this city's housing that is the entire difficulty — a sofa on a third floor with a landing turn, a fridge in a basement behind a bulkhead, a king mattress in a Back Bay walk-up with no elevator.

Removal prices include the carry from wherever the item is standing. Sofa $170 from the third floor or from the sidewalk, same number. No stair charge and no walk-up fee.

The sixth thing, which nobody takes

Household hazardous material is outside all of this. Wet paint, solvents, thinners, gasoline, motor oil, pool chemicals, pesticides, asbestos and medical sharps do not go in a bulk collection, and they do not go on a junk truck either. Every municipality in the metro runs some sort of separate arrangement for them — check yours for what it takes and when.

Paint is the common Boston case, because every basement and garage in New England has a shelf of it. Cans that are genuinely empty and dried hard are ordinary waste. If you have wet cans and time, take the lids off and let them dry out before the pickup. Sealed full ones are $40 for a one-gallon can or $70 for a five-gallon bucket, and a 20lb propane tank is $45 provided it is empty.

What to do instead

Work out which of your items fall into the five categories, because those are the ones that will still be on your sidewalk afterwards. Then decide whether it is worth two trips and a gamble on the collection day, or one booking.

A common Boston end-of-tenancy pile: a queen mattress, a box spring, a sofa and a TV. Priced by item that is $192 for the mattress set plus $170 plus $91, which is $192 + $170 + $91 = $453. Compare it against the truck ladder — quarter $325, three-eighths $455, half $580 — and pay the lower one.

And book before the last week of August if you are moving on September 1, because that is the week the whole city tries to do this at the same time.

Frequently asked questions