Lead-Safe Renovation Debris in Rochester, New York

In most American cities, lead paint is an edge case that comes up on the occasional old house. In Rochester it is the default condition of the job.

More than half of this city’s housing was built before 1940. Roughly nine houses in ten predate 1980. The Rochester metro ranks eighth among large US metros for oldest homes, with a median home age of 57 years. Layer on top of that a city lead ordinance that has been running since 2006, a brand-new state rental registry that names Rochester by name, and a federal rule that covers every pre-1978 house, and you get a market where paint scraping and window replacement are regulated activities almost every time.

We haul debris. We are not a lead inspector, a risk assessor or an abatement contractor, and nothing here is legal advice. What follows is the layout of the three regimes that apply here, and what each of them means for the container in your driveway. For the rules that govern your specific property, talk to the City of Rochester and the New York State Department of Health. For a container, call (585) 514-5622.

Three dates decide almost everything

Whether a rule applies to your building usually comes down to when it was built. Three years matter, and Rochester’s housing stock sits on the wrong side of all three.

Read that table once and the point is obvious. Asbestos surveys, lead-safe work practices and the state’s rental registry are not edge cases in this city. They are the ordinary condition of a renovation.

The City layer: Municipal Code Chapter 90, Article III

Rochester’s Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention ordinance sits at City Code Chapter 90, Article III. It was enacted in 2005 and took effect in July 2006, and it is one of the most-studied municipal lead laws in the country.

What makes it work is where it lives. Rather than building a separate inspection bureaucracy, the City embedded lead inspection inside the existing Certificate of Occupancy process. Inspections happen at C of O application, at renewal, and on complaint. A property cannot get its certificate without clearance or abatement certification under § 90-56.

The inspection cycle

Buildings with three or more rental units are inspected every three years. Buildings with one or two units are inspected every six years — or every three years if they sit in a designated high-risk area and have prior violations.

The high-risk area asymmetry

This is the distinctive part of the ordinance, and it is the piece most people outside the city have never heard of. The Mayor designates a “Lead Paint High-Risk Area” based on health department data.

Inside that area, a property that passes visual inspection must also pass dust wipe testing — even where there is no visible paint deterioration at all. Outside the area, dust testing is triggered only when violations exist. Under § 90-55, every inspection includes a visual assessment for deteriorated paint and bare soil, and in high-risk areas where no interior deterioration is found, owners have a limited window to obtain dust samples or face citation.

Dust wipe testing under § 90-57B is done by certified personnel in up to four rooms, and results have to fall below the federal post-abatement clearance levels. Under § 90-57I the City can reject reports from unqualified inspectors, bar a provider for up to three years, and audit clearance providers at random.

What counts as a violation

Under § 90-54, a violation occurs where deteriorated paint exceeds 20 square feet on the exterior or 2 square feet in any interior room, with a proportional threshold for small components. A rental building has to show no areas of deteriorated paint and no exposed soil within three feet of the house.

Two square feet in a room is not much. It is one bad window stool and the sill under it.

It worked

Between 2006 and 2020 the City inspected 193,584 rental units for deteriorated interior paint, and 50,901 units in designated high-risk areas received dust wipe inspections. Over the period from 1997 to 2011, elevated blood lead levels in Monroe County children fell from 13.4 to 1.1 per 100 tested — a decline researchers put at 2.4 times greater than the statewide decline over the same years. Current program information is with the City of Rochester.

The State layer: the NYS Lead Rental Registry

This one is new, and most contractors have not caught up with it yet.

The New York State Lead Rental Registry was created under Public Health Law § 1377 and took effect on 3 November 2025. It applies to rental properties with two or more units built before 1980, which must be inspected and documented as free of lead-based paint hazards in order to hold a Lead Safety Certificate, with recertification every three years beginning in 2026.

It does not apply everywhere in the state. It applies in 25 “communities of concern” with the highest childhood lead poisoning rates, and Rochester is one of them. So a Rochester landlord with a pre-1980 two-family is now inside two overlapping regimes: the City’s C of O inspection under Chapter 90, and the State’s registry under § 1377. Current requirements, forms and timelines are published by the NYS Department of Health, and that is where to go for the authoritative answer on your building.

The federal layer: EPA RRP, and the window rule

Above both of those sits the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule at 40 CFR Part 745. It covers renovation, repair and painting in pre-1978 housing and child-occupied facilities. Firms performing covered work must hold firm certification before they advertise or perform it, use trained renovators, follow lead-safe work practices, and provide pre-renovation education to the occupants.

There is a minor repair and maintenance exemption, and it is smaller than people assume: six square feet or less of paint per room on the interior, and 20 square feet or less on the exterior.

And then the sentence that matters most in a city like this one:

Window replacement and demolition are always covered, regardless of square footage.

There is no small-job exemption for windows. In a housing stock that is overwhelmingly pre-1978, that means a window job in Rochester is essentially always an RRP job. The same goes for any demolition of a painted component. If you are replacing the original double-hungs in a Park Avenue two-family, the square-footage exemption never enters the conversation. Certification requirements and the current rule text are at EPA; check there for how firm and renovator certification works for a New York contractor.

What lead-safe work does to the debris

Here is the part that concerns the container, and it is the part nobody explains.

Lead-safe work practices are containment practices. The debris does not arrive at the container loose and swept up. It arrives already wrapped, because the work method requires it.

• Everything comes down onto plastic. Interior work is done over sheeting that is folded inward and taped shut at the end of the day, with the dust captured inside it. That sheeting becomes part of the waste stream.
• Components come out whole where possible. A window sash removed intact generates far less dust than a sash chiselled apart in place. It also takes up more room in a container, which is a sizing consequence.
• Chips and dust are bagged, not swept into the pile. Wet methods and HEPA vacuuming are the standard, and the collected material is bagged and sealed.
• The waste is wrapped before it leaves the work area. Sheeting is bundled and taped. Bags are closed. That is how the material travels from the room to the can without recontaminating the walk.
• Exterior work has a ground catch. Sheeting on the ground under the elevation being scraped, weighted at the edges, with the soil around the foundation protected. Remember that under § 90-54 bare and contaminated soil within three feet of the house is itself part of what the City looks at.

So the container is not the containment. It is the last step after the containment has already done its job. Load wrapped material as wrapped material, keep the walk from the work area to the can short and covered, and do not let anybody sweep loose chips across a driveway on the way out.

Where the debris goes

Ordinary lead-safe renovation debris from a residential job — old sash, painted trim, plaster, siding, sheeting and bagged dust — generally moves as construction and demolition debris. Abatement projects and jobs where testing puts the waste into a different category are a different conversation, and one to have with your consultant and the disposal facility before the container arrives, not after it is full. If your job is in that territory, tell us when you book, so nobody is surprised.

What is not negotiable at our end: we do not accept asbestos in our containers. Asbestos in New York moves under a separate NYSDEC Part 364 permit and is handled by contractors licensed under the Department of Labor’s Industrial Code Rule 56. On a pre-1974 Rochester house, that matters more than people expect, because the same building that has lead paint on the trim commonly has 9×9 vinyl asbestos floor tile in the back hall and wrapped insulation on the boiler pipes. Two separate regimes, two separate answers, one house.

Sizing a container for a lead job

Lead work changes the mix of what goes in the can, and that changes the size.

• A window replacement on a city house. Old wood sash and frames are bulkier than they are heavy, and they come out whole. Fifteen or twenty yards covers most whole-house window jobs, and the driver is volume, not weight.
• Interior plaster removal. Plaster on wood lath is dense, and it fills a container by weight long before it fills it by volume. A 10-yard run more than once beats a 20-yard you cannot legally haul.
• Exterior scraping and siding. Wood siding, trim, sheeting and bagged chips. Light and bulky, so size for volume.
• A full unit turnover. Fifteen yards for one unit of a two-family. Thirty for a whole building including the basement and attic. Our article on two-family turnovers works through the sequencing.

Dimensions and weight guidance are on the container sizes page. For debris rules across a construction job generally, see our piece on construction debris disposal in New York.

Placement, and one City rule worth knowing

City lots are narrow. We need about 10.5 feet of clear width at the pad, roughly 60 feet of straight approach, and better than 20 feet of clear overhead — and in Rochester the overhead is often a full-grown street tree with the electric service drop running underneath it. Look up before you tell us where to put it.

We lay plywood under every wheel and under the rails on every driveway placement. Monroe County sits on silt loams, Collamer and Niagara with Honeoye as the signature series, and they go soft when frost is coming out of the ground in March and April.

If a container has to sit in the street, City Code § 104-24 requires a written permit from the City Engineer, and § 104-24(C) requires the obstruction to be barricaded and lit at night. On a Rochester street in December, sunset is before five o’clock. Contact the Department of Environmental Services for current fees.

One more, from the same code: § 20-15F says “Contractors performing work must make arrangements for the proper and legal collection and disposal of waste generated during the construction process and such waste shall not be collected by the City.” Lead-safe renovation debris is construction waste. It is yours to haul.

Where to get the real answer for your building

These three regimes overlap and they do not answer to each other. The City runs Chapter 90 through the C of O. The State runs the Lead Rental Registry under Public Health Law § 1377. The federal RRP rule sits over both. A building can satisfy one and still owe something to another.

So do not take a haulier’s word for compliance, including ours. For the City ordinance, the high-risk area boundaries and the C of O process, go to the City. For the Lead Rental Registry, the Lead Safety Certificate and the recertification cycle, go to the Department of Health. For RRP certification and lead-safe work practices, go to EPA. If your job is complicated, hire a certified risk assessor before you start, not after a dust wipe comes back over the clearance level.

What we can tell you with confidence is what fits, what it weighs, where it goes and when we can be there. Our construction dumpster service covers the equipment side. Call (585) 514-5622, tell us the age of the building, how many units, and what is coming out, and we will size it with you.