If the business provides trash receptacles for their customers, and if for some reason a customer decides not to use the receptacles provided for them, but leaves the premises, walks around the building to where the dumpsters are located, and dumps trash there that they otherwise would have thrown out in the customer-facing receptacles, there’s no real theft of services.
But businesses that provide trash receptacles for customers are generally providing them for trash generated as part of a sale (such as restaurants) or as a convenience service provided to presumably paying customers. They don’t generally provide free use of trash receptacles to random members of the general public who happen to be walking by, nor are they generally expecting large volumes of non-business-related trash.
There’s also the the fact that if they’ve provided trash receptacles for customer use, and you instead use their dumpster which is marked “No Dumping”, you’re violating their terms of service. You don’t get to decide where to dump your trash when you’re dumping it on someone else’s property at their expense.
In practical terms, if you throw away a gum wrapper in a business’ customer facing trash receptacles or in their dumpster as you’re walking by, it’s hard to imagine anyone would actually pursue dumping charges. But if you’re using their in-store trash receptacles to dump your weekly household trash, the business is pretty likely to object. And if you’re surreptitiously using their dumpsters for the same, that’s pretty clearly theft of services in most jurisdictions.
I live in a large apartment complex, and non-residents have been caught using our dumpsters. AFAIK, they’re just told not to do it again, but it does take up space that is needed for residential garbage.
This, exactly. I’ve seen pickup trucks laden with construction-related debris pull up to dumpsters in apartment parking lots, and the driver will literally fill the dumpster with things like drywall sheets, rolls of carpeting, old bathroom fixtures, etc., etc., and drive off without a care in the world. This is straight-up theft of services.
I’ve seen the same thing, but they were trucks with our complex’s logo on it and I recognized the men tossing the contents into the dumpster. Outsiders doing this, or something similar, means that the space isn’t there for people who need it.
You basically pay for a dumpster if you want one. Not everyone has a dumpster – there is generally at least six people on each block who have a dumpster. The charge is little enough and most people seem to like the convenience of having a dumpster in the alley behind the house.
We used to have a dumpster behind the office. At one point we had the city move our dumpster to the recycling center which is just across the alley behind us. They added more dumpsters and there are generally two or three dumpsters now. Those are now the most used dumpsters in town and are dumped nearly every weekday. So from the back door of the office, I have maybe 5 feet more to carry my trash now than I did before. And we have more room in the alley to drive through it.
One thing to keep in mind is that dumpsters can hold a lot of garbage. I would bet that a typical household wouldn’t fill one in a month. Maybe not in two months. The city dumps them as often as needed and at least once a week.
One Saturday afternoon, the director of utilities for the city and I were standing in the alley talking when someone pulled up in a pickup with the back full of trash and asked where the could dump the trash. He and some others were cleaning out an old house that nobody had used in a very long time and it was full of trash to dump. The city director told them to use any dumpster but it would be best if they dumped it in the dumpsters in the alley (not just in this block) that we were standing in. By evening, they had nearly ever dumpster in the alley for several blocks in each direction. So on Sunday, the city director went and got the garbage after church and after eating lunch and dumped every dumpster in the alley.
The one time you wouldn’t want to use another dumpster is if it was a dumpster not handled by the city. Some companies will bring a very large trash bin that is something like the length of a trailer in order to dump construction trash.
But for any city dumpster, feel free to use it.
Also, I think that under state law, the only dumpsters that are explicitly protected are business dumpsters. I guess most towns and cities just has the residents leave the trash on the curb one day a week for pickup. We don’t do that here and it works far better than I ever saw in a big city. If you need to carry out the trash, you don’t have to wait for your one day a week. If I’m cooking something that the dogs will try to raid out of the trash, I usually just put them in a plastic bag from the grocery store (I keep some on hand for this occasion) and take them out to the dumpster after the meal.
There is one thing that I find rather funny. Some homeowners used to paint “their” dumpster to make it pretty. When the garbage truck is broken down, they pick up the dumpsters that are full and haul them to the city shop and bring out another dumpster. Once they get the garbage truck repaired and dump the garbage from those dumpsters, they don’t take them back to the same house where they got them.
That whole story doesn’t really make any sense to me - apparently the only way trash gets picked up in your town is by being placed in a dumpster ( because you contrast your town with other places where they leave the trash on the curb for pickup) but people have to pay for a dumpster if they want one and the director of utilities tells people to dump trash in any dumpster they want to. It doesn’t add up - if in fact you can legally put your trash in any dumpster you want to and there isn’t any way to dispose of your trash without putting in a dumpster, why would five or six people on the block be willing to pay for a service used by everyone on the block ?
Change things around a little, so that people aren’t paying for the dumpster and are just allowing the city to place it on their property and it might sense - but I cannot imagine a town where five or six households per street are willing to pay the trash collection costs for the whole street.
This is why questions of law rarely belong in FQ: there’s usually no single or consistent answer, and the variability causes endless and irrelevant arguments which boil down to “nuh-uh, that’s not how it is here!”
If you don’t want the inconvenience of having to walk down the alley to another dumpster or driving it down to the dumpsters in the recycling center, then you pay to have one behind your house. And a great many people do.
As for the city, it is far more convenient to not have a dumpster behind every house. I suspect that they would just as soon have only one or two dumpsters per block. After all, it would be the same amount of trash whether it is one dumpster or fifteen dumpsters and the time to dump each individual dumpster is pretty much constant.
If the city grants you authorization to dump your trash in any dumpster in town that is owned by the city, then your doing so is hardly unauthorized.
The one sticky point could be when the dumpster is on private property. Even if you were authorized by the city to dump your trash in the dumpster, the property owner could refuse you permission to enter their property to dump trash in the dumpster.
I can think of very few dumpsters in this town that are on private property. Nearly all are in the alley.
The reason I came across this thread was because of an upcoming trial in Abilene in which a father and son shot and killed a neighbor who put a mattress in their dumpster in 2018 and they took it back out of the dumpster.
Well, if you toss your used drink cup and bag of burger wrapper that you bought there, no one will care.
But if you bring over a half dozen big bags of trash, you are stealing their trash space. That is expensive, and some business have to get a extra dumpster or extra pickup.
