Allamakee County Waste & Recycling

10/23/2026

FYI: You will start seeing big brown dumpsters showing up at the Rural dumpsites today, those dumpsters will be used for recycling on the nights that the garbage truck is there, they are locked and are NOT for garbage. We will start doing the sites Monday and will go one more week with the 3-7 and then start 2-6 November 2.

Send a message to learn more

10/05/2026

Update on services change on November 1, 2026. As we announced a while back we will be starting to run our own Rural service at the five Rural sites around the County. The sites will be on the same days and the hours will be from 2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. That will be the same amount of hours at the sites but will start an hour earlier and end at 6 instead of 7. With winter approaching and it being dark around 4 with cold, wind and snow coming in we would rather not have our employee out in the dark for three hours.
We will reevaluate the hours after the winter season.
Recycling will be accepted at the Rural sites as well and Richards Sanitation will have dumpsters at the sites for plastic and cardboard. Please be ready to dump your recycling out of your bags and into the dumpster so there is room for everyone's recycling, cardboard should be flattened and thrown into the cardboard dumpster. Once again we will reiterate we will only take bagged household garbage and no bigger items are allowed, town people are not allowed at any of these sites.
Lastly, we have signs up at the Main site announcing that on November 1, all Waukon citizens and businesses will not be allowed to use the Main Rural dumpsite as the costs that are affiliated with this service are no longer available and remember that this site is run with Rural tax money only. The City of Waukon were notified of this change and have been putting services in place to take the place of this service, please contact your Waukon City office for that information in the future.
Recycling such as Electronics, batteries, appliances and cardboard will still be available for Waukon citizens and businesses.
We hope to keep this service going for many years to come,
Thank you.

08/25/2026

Hello all, it's time for an update for the Rural people's services and what's happening in the near future. Our Waste Hauling contract is up on November 1st of this year. We bid out the new contract with 3 Hauling companies and received the bids back that were basically triple from what we a paying now. With that said the Rural sites that sit around the County five days a week were in jeopardy of closing so we decided to Buy a small garbage truck and do this service ourselves. With this decision we will save in the ballpark of $75000 to $100000 per year, but it is still very expensive. With that said one of the main problems with hiring out for the Rural sites are the hours, I would like people to give their opinion on what they would like to see for hours at the Rural sites and comment here or privately message on this site for what hours would be best for everyone. We are aware that we won't be able to please everyone, but your input would be appreciated. The Main site and some of the Recycling at the Rural sites will be handled by Richards Sanitation and we are looking forward to working with them as they are a class act family run organization!

Send a message to learn more

04/28/2026

Please note this is on a Friday. Republic Services informed us they no longer do clean up days on Saturday.

04/27/2026

Just a few comments on the garbage service that is provided for the Rural community; The County Waste and Recycling Dept. was designed to handle the Rural peoples everyday garbage and recycling, with that in mind there is a difference between a garbage business and a garbage service, we do not have any trucks or landfills to run to when we are full and we work with very few employees to keep expenses down for the tax payer.
A garbage business is designed to take large amounts of garbage and debris and has several trucks and employees to haul them to landfills where they are contracted to haul endless loads of debris.
We are a garbage service not a garbage business and are supposed to be for Rural residents only as they are the only tax that we use for this service so through the years we have morphed into taking debris from the cities and then charge a small amount to city residents to make up for the difference.
Between Friday afternoon and Saturday we filled a compactor box in less than 10 hours of work time, that is an average of a Ton per hour and hasn't happened in 24 years but has happened twice in the last two weeks, so I think we need to go over what should actually come to the Solid Waste site.
We are not here to run anyone's business refuse for them, we are not able to handle everyone's total house clean outs when their relatives pass away, we can't handle farm clean ups and large decks that get dismantled or sheds and trailer houses that need disposing.
Are goal is to handle every Rural persons regular household garbage and recycling and to keep the Rural sites around the County going into the future and when it becomes fiscally out of reach with hauling companies to hire it out, we will do the service ourselves if it pays to do so.
We intend to continue to receive small projects such as a bathroom remodel with toilets and so forth. The town people will continue to bring small amounts of projects and a couch or lazy boy for a fee. If you use the service we provide we feel that one trip a week is sufficient for your needs and would hope you don't come
three and four times a week so we can keep unnecessary traffic to a minimum especially on Saturdays.
For large amounts of anything there are many alternatives for people: Hirth's Junk Removal has a dumpster service from Waukon and Richards Sanitation along with Republic Sanitation have dumpsters available and if you want to haul your own large projects Richards Sanitation in Caledonia MN and Waste Management in Prarie Du Chien have drive in dumping available.
Lastly we have looked into a Transfer Station for the county but we are looking at close to 2 million dollars for such a service and that type of funding is not available at this time so lets try to use the services we have with some common sense.
Thank you
Dave Mooney, Solid Waste Manager

Send a message to learn more