My understanding is that the cities do care that people steal the valuable scrap metal from the recycling, since their budget assumes that they make some money from recycling it.
In my city you can call and let them know you will be putting a large item out on trash day, and they’ll either pick it up with the regular trash pickup or send a special truck around to pick it up. Although, depending on what you put out, scavengers may grab it before the trash truck shows up.
We had an old water heater in our basement for years before finally getting around to calling the city for pickup. It was gone within a half hour after I put it out on the curb the night before. My wife said “If I would have known it was that easy, I would have done it a long time ago!” 
We’re in a condo complex with no set dates for heavy and/or bulky items, such things can turn up in their designated locations on any given day. My SO loves to bring stuff home to see if it can be fixed; we got some floor lamps and a boombox this way.
We don’t have trash pick up or any days that it’s free to bring anything to the dump - recycling a small range of plastics and cardboard is free, however. I dropped off food at the food pantry on Thursday and saw them giving away the bags we have to pay for to even use the dump to dispose of trash… I’m glad that’s an option, but it’s still kind of depressing that there’s no other way for low-income folks to avoid paying for the bags that are $1.25 each 
Anyway, if you want to get rid of something you’d have to pay even more for at the dump (like $15 per air conditioner or $10 for a couch) you stick it out at the side of the road with a Free sign and/or post on Craigslist that it’s free, free for repair, or free for scrap.
That was weird; your post repeated after about three hours.
NYC temporarily rescinded their recycling law when our area was hit by Hurricane Sandy. Metal scrapping trucks were curb crawling everywhere, taking away boilers, furnaces, washing machines, etc., anything metal that was fouled by raw sewage or salt water.
The year before, an artist who took an old antenna he found at the curb in my Brooklyn neighborhood (for an art installation) received a $1000 fine!
From https://rules.cityofnewyork.us/tags/local-law-56-2013 :
On August 12, 2013, Mayor Bloomberg signed Local Law No. 56 for the year 2013. This law … enhances the City’s enforcement of the scavenging law by punishing those who unlawfully take City property or recyclables for their own financial gain.
In my city there’s no designated day for that sort of trash, rather you can call the city’s solid waste department or go online and schedule a “bulky waste pickup”, and you put it out on the curb on the day you scheduled. Bulky waste can be anything from tree limbs that are too large for your yard waste bin, to furniture or appliances. It’s free of charge but there’s a limit to how many pickups you can schedule per year.
Electronics do not go with bulky waste, but for that you can schedule a “household hazardous waste” pickup. Besides electronics, household hazardous waste can be things like used motor oil, antifreeze, paint, pesticides, other household chemicals, fluorescent light bulbs, batteries, and other stuff I probably can’t think of at the moment.
Beckdawrek, I hope you’re not burning plastics. A household burn barrel doesn’t get the right temperatures and emits dioxins and other pollutants into the air. (Cite’s from NYState, I don’t know whether burn barrels are illegal where you live.)
It’s complicated here.
Yes, saturday was heavy trash day where anyone can put lots of stuff out like furniture, carpet (cut up and tied in 4 ft bundles), tree limbs (4 ft bundles) and the CITY pays for that pickup.
Now our normal weekly trash, we have 2 bins - 1 regular trash, 1 recyclables, that we pay ourselves and I’m thinking its like $10 a month. I pay for it thru my home owners association. Those bins are loaded by machines and if they get broken they replace them. It doesnt matter if their 10 people or 2 people each house only gets the 2 bins. Luckily they arent to picky about what goes in each.
Lawn debris has to be in those big paper bags or bins marked for it. That is picked up by a special run which still has guys tossing trash bags and cans.
Now SOME people in our neighborhood dont pay the fee and just take care of it themselves. Like someone said above they might just take it to work or they have another way to dispose of it. Our HOA has to monitor it so they dont get free trash pickup. Although it doesnt matter on heavy trash day they can still leave anything at the curb.
On heavy trash day we cant put construction debris (ex. drywall, shingles, boards, fencing) out but they had a dumping area where you could haul over pickup truck or trailer loads and unload it yourself. I took 2 loads this year.
You can take your big screen tv and other electronics to Best Buy and they take them for a fee.
It’s called “bulky trash” here, and you have to go on the county’s website and open a service ticket. You fill out the form telling them your address and what you’re getting rid of, and as long as your item is on their pull-down list, they’ll give you a date, you put your stuff out on the curb the night before, and sometime the next day they’ll come pick it up and take it to the landfill (I assume). They have one day per month per district.
It is a very blue-collar neighborhood where I live, and at least 50% of the time someone will come along and pick up my junk before the county can get to it, so now when I have something big to dump, I’ll leave it out on the curb a for a day before calling in the county to see if it won’t just walk away on its own.
The county also does yard waste pickups every Monday. They prefer it in yard waste bags, but they’ve still taken it when I’ve just dumped it in a regular trash can.
My HOA contracts with trash management. We have bulk pickup the 3rd Saturday of every month. They take anything, except if it’s in a trash bag 
Regular trash pickup is 2 days a week, and they take anything as long as you can get it into a trash bag.
The city where I lived last year had a “recycling center” where residents could take just about anything and get rid of it. They would recycle what they could (actually, contract with a recycling company) and dump what they couldn’t, all paid for as part of the city taxes. Now I’m in the unincorporated part of the county and I just have to call the garbage service company a day or 2 in advance an let them know what large stuff I will be putting at the curb. I like the latter much better, I don’t have to load the junk in my truck and haul it across town!
We have household compost and yard waste pickup weekly. Yard waste has to fit into bins/bags or be bundled. Other pickups alternate between paper recyclables on one week and metal/glass/plastic recyclables plus non-compostable garbage on the other week. Electronics and hazardous waste can be dropped off at the main dump site or at special disposal events held around the city every couple of months.
The city will pick up large items but prefer you to call and advise them. We put out an old fold-out double bed/couch and the regular garbage truck did an impressive job of compacting it! The one thing that they won’t take is construction debris. If it fits in a regular garbage bin its OK, but anything bulky, or stuff like patio slabs, has to be taken to a dump site and paid for (although concrete & other masonry debris is pretty cheap to dispose of as they break it up and use it for fill).
Normal weekly collection is funded by taxes as part of the city’s responsibility for public health.
My mothers suburb had a policy that all hard rubbish could stay out for a week or two, to let the pickers recycle and to reduce the amount the council had to haul away. Other councils in Melbourne tried to have a policy that picking was illegal, because they were selling the right to collect to reduce the amount they had to pay for collection.
My council used to have hard rubbish days, but went to an “on demand” system where you made a booking for collection. To “save money”, perhaps partly by avoiding picking. It turns out it actually costs more, and seems to have zero community support, but they are sticking with it. I sometimes wonder about subtle forms of corruption.
The central city here always had “on demand” collection, but it has expensive taxes, no yard space, full services and other special considerations. It worked well except that they cheated: to keep the streets clear, you could only put out your rubbish immediately before collection. Then they would arrive early, find nothing, and nick off to arrive early at the next scheduled address.
Where is this? I never heard of (or could imagine a need for) thrice weekly trash.
And Beck - you every hear of Southern Culture on the Skids’ tune “My Neighbor Burns Trash”? 
Around our part suburbs tend to have one heavy trash day every year or 2, when you can toss out anything (other than - I think- building supplies or dirt.) I think they call it Spring Clean-up or something. When they started, it was amazing the amount of shit people apparently allowed to build up in their homes. Because we can toss oversized objects any week with the regular trash. You just have to affix a sticker (cost a buck or 2.) Always amused me to the juxtaposition between see some cheap, broken piece of shit on the curb in front of a nice suburban home.
Not only the scrappers, but it was fun to watch the neighborhood kids dragging other people’s trash home.
I think they lessened it to every other year, because their wasn’t as much trash.
Around here it’s called “Community Clean-Up Day,” and it’s done three times per year. As it happens, the most recent one was just last Saturday.
I put out an old TV aerial that had blown down in high winds earlier in the month. I didn’t see who, but someone after scrap metal must have picked it up. It was gone before the “official” truck came around.
My wife and I arrived in Auckland, NZ in October of 2013 while the city was having a city wide bulk cleanup. We took a walk around the neighborhood where the BnB we stayed at was located. We found some souvenirs to take home with us and something for my wife’s cousin in Christchurch.
One of the first piles of stuff we stopped at contained a couple boxes of tea cups and saucers. My wife would have taken them all but getting them back home would be very difficult. She picked a couple vintage looking pieced of bone china made in England. Later I found a cricket bat that looked to be in decent condition, later someone was tossing a bucket of what looked like red baseballs. They were cricket balls. I took two. The last thing we found was a bag of yarn. My wife called her cousin in Christchurch to see if she wanted it. Heck yeah she did. We had brought a 3rd suit case with us just for souvenirs and all the yarn just fit.
What I thought was strange the New Zealand version of TSA let me take the cricket bat on the plane when we flew from Auckland to Christchurch. But when we were flying from Christchurch to Auckland, the cricket bat was removed. I didn’t find out till we landed in San Francisco and saw an orange tag on the handle of the suitcase. The tag said a “potentially dangerous” item was removed by NZ security at the Christchurch airport. At least my 2 balls made it home with me.
We get two free “household junk pickups” every year from the city; you an go to their website and schedule a pickup whenever you want. You can also schedule two free “appliance and e-waste pickups”, and just a few weeks ago our monthly utilities bill included a coupon for one free load at the dump.
When we lived in SCal, we were within city limits and had trash picked up once a week. When we packed up everything to make our big move to AZ, oh GAWD we had trash. We got a dumpster, had scavengers spreading our crap out into the street, and I don’t want to talk about it any more.
The “problem child” of a big, bulky heavy item required a phone call and special trip by waste management to our house. There was a lot of discussion and an exception was made for “just this once.”
The item was a king size waterbed mattress.
I don’t want to talk about that, either.
~VOW