I’ve just been through this. You’re likely talking lorry loads, not pick-up truck loads.
Whenever I have to come up with a cash payrate for someone I usually make it somewhere in the region of my after tax hourly rate, on the assumption that the other persons time is as valuable to them as mine is to me. If I over pay them good luck to them.
Like most things in the US, it probably depends where you are. I am unaware of a blanket federal (basically EPA) ban on incineration. But individual states or municipalities could ban incineration.
It is indeed all crap and I just want it gone. There are no overlooked gems, no stamp collections, no undiscovered antique furniture. It’s mainly an assortment of broken, cheap furniture that the Salvation Army won’t take (seriously–they have their standards). In many cases we bought the items from them to begin with, so after a certain number of years of use, when it breaks and gets put out in the garage, they don’t want it back again. The broken child’s dresser, the armchair with the springs broken and no stuffing–where am I going to find someone to give these things a loving home? Answer: nowhere in Central Illinois, that’s fer sure. Maybe in large urban areas you have fixer-upper “live lightly on the land” people who are willing to do that, but not here. What people do here is have a garage sale, but broken and nasty furniture won’t sell even at a garage sale.
And there’s a 2-foot swimming pool that’s been festering on the garage floor for several years now.
And a big pile of old carpet, with foam. And a broken trellis. Miscellaneous piles of chicken wire.
And things like two leftover bales of blown-in insulation that, let’s face it, we’re never going to use, after 15 years.
And the leftover remnants of when the Better Half remodeled our small travel trailer. What do you do with a trailer dinette and the trailer bunk beds that he built that didn’t really work all that well?
Just junk. And Meador Disposal allows homeowners to dispose of one (1) oversize item per year; you call ahead and arrange for them to come get, say, your old sofa on a certain day, and you put it out in the alley for them.
You are allowed to put a couple of bulging Hefty sacks out for them once a week, along with your regular kitchen garbage, and I have actually toyed with the idea of cutting up the junk into Hefty-sack-size bits and putting them out twice a week for the next couple of years, like a mass murderer disposing of his victims by sending them to the landfill one bag at a time, but gave that up as too time-consuming, plus even after I had disassembled the trailer bunk beds, then I’d still have to saw the 2 x 4s into Hefty-sack-sized lengths, and frankly life’s too short. I’m 52, I don’t wanna spend my Golden Years cleaning the garage. Much easier to pay this guy to come haul it all away.
We do not have little people who cruise the alleys looking for salvageable stuff. What we do have is The Guy From Neighborhood Services, who cruises the alleys armed with a Polaroid, looking for anything that isn’t properly bestowed in a trash can–and if it’s still there in two weeks or so, meaning Meador Disposal passed on picking it up several times, you get a nastygram from the City.
As for taking responsibility to see that he doesn’t dump it illegally, well, the last time I looked, back in the early 90’s, the Macon County landfill was charging $11 a load to dump. It’s bound to be higher now. And frankly we don’t have an extra $15 to $20 a load for this, just for landfill fees. And I’m assuming that the “friend” who incinerates stuff can salvage some of this–the pool filter worked fine before we dragged the whole wretched thing into the garage, and some of the furniture is Salvation Army-type fixable, to someone who is highly motivated and has a lot of time on his hands, with the eventual expectation that maybe Redman’s Furniture would give him five bucks for it, but since we bought it from them for $20 to begin with, that’s all they’d give him for it, 15 years later.
Decatur, and Macon County, have bans on burning that come and go according to the political climate downtown. Some years they’re in force, some years they aren’t. And they are widely ignored, as long as what you’re burning isn’t a big pile of smoldering leaves that takes all day to burn. You can go out there, burn a quick pile of something, put it out with the garden hose, and be done before your nosy neighbor has time to call Neighborhood Services, who are closed on weekends in any case. And that’s in town. So I’m not terrifically worried about some guy out in the boonies who burns stuff on his 10 acres.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” obtains in a big way when there’s $$$ at stake. 
I ran it past the Better Half, who is the most ethical and honest person I know, and he didn’t have any problem with it.
I could give you a diatribe about how we as a culture have not set up an infrastructure to cope with the inevitable result of our “throwaway society”, with things like municipal EPA-rated incinerators and organized recycling swap meets.
But I won’t, because it’s a beautiful September Saturday morning and you don’t deserve that on a Saturday morning 
P.S. As regards the guy’s fee…on Thursday night he asked the Better Half for a $20 advance “because his car was out of gas”, and on Friday night he asked him for a $40 advance “because his insurance was going to expire on his truck.” This does not bode well for the whole arrangement. I have now instructed the Better Half that I require him to spend Sunday afternoon finalizing a price, and a deal, with this guy, so I don’t have to do it as the Little Woman on Monday morning, and get told something different from what was agreed on. And yes, I had already decided to make this guy give me a receipt for every load, to prove that yes, I did pay him.
I dunno, DDG, if you have the money to maintain a house, and managed to buy all of this stuff in the first place, then I think you can find some extra cash to see that it gets disposed of properly. Or at least the time to call the landfill and ask what current rates are. And unless I’ve missed something, it doesn’t seem like you’ve asked this guy any specifics of what he’s gonna do with this stuff, other than if you’d have to pay landfill fees. Sorry, I know that’s not what you’re asking here but I have to say that.
Well, the house in question is a 1920s four-square in a working-class bungalow-rental/food-stamp neighborhood on the Near East Side of Decatur, which we bought in 1986 for $29,000.
And the stuff we bought, as mentioned, originally came from the Salvation Army or Redman’s (Used) Furniture, so, for example, the child’s dresser only cost, IIRC, $20 to begin with.
So we’re not talking about upper-middle-class suburbanites in a $200,000 split-level with a garage full of Ethan Allen furniture. We’re talking a working-class joe (letter carrier) with one kid in college and another one starting next fall.
So no, we don’t have extra money for landfill fees. We actually shouldn’t be paying someone to haul it away at all, but I’m working part-time (at Walgreens, 18 hours a week) so it’s coming out of my small paycheck.
The barter system is awesome if you can find a taker. So many people only care about cash, when there’s perfectly good stuff you can get (particularly from a garage!).
I once traded a really nice bed for a paint job in my bathroom. It is sooo worth it!
I’m not sure about other states, but in at least NH and MA this is handled on the city/town level, with each city having their own ordinances. You can find out what the law where you live is at the fire department and city/town hall.