Dumpster Rental in Irondequoit, NY

Roll-off containers for Irondequoit homes and jobsites

Irondequoit is a small town by area — 16.83 square miles — with 51,043 people packed into it, wedged between the Genesee River, Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay. What makes it distinctive for us is when it was built. The town had 23,376 people in 1940 and 55,337 by 1960, a jump of 136 percent in twenty years. Almost the whole town went up inside that window. Drive it and you can see it: street after street of ranches, capes and small colonials from the late 1940s and the 1950s, garages that were added later, and a remarkably consistent lot size.

That single-generation building history gives Irondequoit a debris profile that is completely different from the city’s. In Rochester proper we are pulling plaster and wood lath out of houses built before 1930. Here we are pulling drywall, mid-century kitchen cabinets, sheet panelling, acoustic ceiling tile, aluminium and vinyl siding over the original, and carpet laid over hardwood that somebody is about to rediscover. It is lighter material by volume, which means the sizing logic flips: an Irondequoit job usually fills up before it weighs out, where a city job weighs out before it fills up. That is not a small distinction when you are choosing between a 20 and a 30.

The other thing about a town built in one generation is that it ages in one generation too. The people who bought these houses new are gone or moving on, and estate work is a large share of what we do here. A 1950s ranch with a full basement, an attached garage and a floored attic holds an extraordinary amount, and the family clearing it out is nearly always working to a closing date. Those jobs are 20- and 30-yard jobs, they run for a week or two, and they benefit enormously from having the right container on the driveway from day one rather than discovering the problem halfway through. Full basements are near-universal here as they are across this county, and the basement is where the volume actually is.

Irondequoit runs its own town government, its own building department and its own highway department, and the City of Rochester’s lead ordinance and right-of-way permit do not apply on this side of the line. But most of this housing postdates the dates that trigger the heaviest regulation anyway. Houses whose original construction commenced after 1 January 1974 sit outside New York’s asbestos survey requirement, and post-1978 construction is outside the federal lead-safe work practice rules — though a great deal of Irondequoit was built before 1978, so lead is still a live question on the paint. The weather is not negotiable in either direction: 102.0 inches of snow in an average year across the region, more of it on the lake side of town, and driveways that need plywood in March. Access here is generally kind. The postwar lots have driveways that run straight to an attached garage, wide enough for a container beside the car rather than in front of it, and the ground is flat across most of the town. The exceptions are the bayfront and lakeshore streets, where the lots step down toward the water, driveways are steeper and shorter, and some of the older cottages have no usable drive at all. Those need a look before we commit to a size. Tell us on the phone if the house is on the bay side or the lake side rather than out on the grid, and send a photograph of the drive if you are unsure. It takes a minute and it saves an argument.

What we know about working in Irondequoit

The good news in Irondequoit is that most of this housing was built after the dates that trigger the heaviest rules, and the bad news is that most people assume that means no rules at all. Sort out which side of each line your house falls on. New York’s asbestos rule, 12 NYCRR Part 56, exempts from the survey requirement structures whose original construction commenced after 1 January 1974 — that covers only the later end of this town, and the Department of Labor is explicit that a building qualifying for an exemption must still be assumed to contain asbestos and demolished as an asbestos project unless a survey documents otherwise. In a 1950s ranch the usual candidates are nine-by-nine floor tile, the mastic under it, pipe wrap on the old heating lines and sometimes the siding. We do not take asbestos in our containers at all; it moves under a separate NYSDEC Part 364 permit with a licensed contractor. The federal lead-safe work practice rules cover pre-1978 housing, which is most of Irondequoit, and window replacement and demolition are always in scope. On an estate cleanout, the categories that come out of the load before anything else are electronics, which have been banned from New York trash since 1 January 2015 under ECL Article 27, Title 26; rechargeable batteries, banned under Title 18 with e-bike and e-scooter batteries added in 2025; tires, under Title 19; and mercury thermostats, banned since 2005 — and NYSDEC says outright that contractors demolishing buildings are required to bring mercury thermostats to collection programs. Old paint, solvents, garden chemicals and half-used cans of everything else go to the Monroe County ecopark at 10 Avion Drive, which requires an appointment for household hazardous waste but takes electronics, appliances, fluorescent lights, propane tanks and scrap metal walk-in, for county residents only. Paint has its own free route through the PaintCare program, which has run in New York since May 2022 under ECL Article 27, Title 20. Sizing for an Irondequoit estate job: a 20 for a basement and garage, a 30 for a whole house, and a second swap booked in advance rather than hoped for. Most Monroe County towns restrict overnight on-street parking through the winter, with the months and hours varying town by town, so the driveway is where the box goes. Before the first day, work through our Rochester estate cleanout checklist.

• RegionMonroe County
• Distance from our yard5 miles north-east of our Hague Street yard
• Main routesLyell Avenue east to Lake Avenue, north across the river and east on Ridge Road for the western half
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Ridge Road East is the spine of this run. We come across on Lyell Avenue, pick up Lake Avenue north over the river, and turn east on Ridge, which serves most of the town. Titus Avenue covers the northern streets, Culver Road brings us up from the city for the eastern side, and the Outer Loop is the fast option for anything toward Irondequoit Bay. Call it twenty-five minutes in ordinary traffic. Before booking we want the address, the driveway width and surface, whether the box needs to sit clear of an attached garage door, and what is overhead. Then the load. Estate and cleanout work here is high-volume and light, so the question is how many rooms plus the basement plus the garage, not how heavy the material is. If concrete, block or a foundation dig is involved, that goes in a separate smaller container, because those two loads do not belong in the same box.

Routes we run: Lyell Avenue east to Lake Avenue, north across the river and east on Ridge Road for the western half, Ridge Road East straight across the town, which is the spine of most of our Irondequoit work, Titus Avenue east from the Lake Avenue end for the northern streets, the Outer Loop north and east for anything toward Irondequoit Bay, Culver Road north out of the city for the eastern side of town.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Irondequoit

On a private driveway in Irondequoit the placement question is mostly not a permit question at all, and that surprises people. A container that sits entirely on your own driveway or private property is generally outside the City of Rochester’s right-of-way permit requirement at City Code § 104-24, and the towns around the city take the same broad view of private ground. The moment any part of the box, or the room the truck needs to set it down, touches the sidewalk, the tree lawn or the street, the answer changes. Inside the city line that means a written right-of-way permit from the City Engineer. § 104-24(A) puts it plainly: no person shall “place or suffer to remain materials of any kind or any goods, wares, merchandise, equipment, machinery or other article or obstruction in the right-of-way without a permit in writing from the City Engineer, except while in the process of actively loading or unloading.” Read the rest of that section before you plan a street placement, because § 104-24(C) requires the obstruction to be barricaded and lit at night, the City Engineer sets the conditions and the timeframe, a permit can be revoked without notice under § 104-24(B), and everything has to be off the right-of-way by the time it expires under § 104-24(D). On a Rochester street in December the sun is down before five o’clock, so we put reflective marking on every street placement as a matter of course. Current fees and the application process come from the Department of Environmental Services rather than from any web page, ours included. Outside the city the same call goes to the town’s own public works or engineering office, because street rules follow the address. Winter tightens all of it: the City limits any vehicle to twelve hours in one spot under § 111-16 and can prohibit parking along designated snow routes by declaration under § 111-73, and most Monroe County towns ban overnight on-street parking through the winter, with the months and the hours differing town by town. A container in the street is governed separately from all of that, by the § 104-24 permit, but the simplest answer in Irondequoit is nearly always the driveway. The driveway has a rule of its own, and it is a fire rule. New York’s fire code is the Fire Code of New York State, adopted at 19 NYCRR Part 1225, and it carries the International Fire Code requirement that a container over the size threshold not be placed inside a building or within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. Five feet is the stable number and we work to it. The capacity threshold itself tightened in the 2025 code cycle, so if the only workable spot is tight against the building, check with your local code enforcement officer before we deliver. We keep every container five feet off the siding, the soffit line and any door or window, clear of exits, fire-apparatus access and hydrants, and no flammable or combustible liquids go in it. There is no statewide per-dumpster fire permit in New York, and Rochester does not appear to require a fire-department permit for a temporary container; what it does require, for a street placement, is the right-of-way permit above. When you pick the spot, look up as well as around. Rochester’s mature street canopy has the electrical service drop running underneath it, and a spot that is wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet.

Two more rules reach every job we run, and both come from the state rather than the town. The first is asbestos, and New York files it somewhere people do not expect: the rule is 12 NYCRR Part 56, Industrial Code Rule 56, enforced by the New York State Department of Labor — an industrial code rule, not an environmental regulation. § 56-5.1 requires an asbestos survey before demolition, renovation, remodeling or repair. The carve-out is narrow and it gets misread constantly: it covers “the owner of one and two-family dwellings who contracts for, but does not direct or control the work.” That is not the same thing as houses being exempt. The survey exemptions — agricultural buildings, structures whose original construction commenced after 1 January 1974, and buildings certified structurally unsound by a licensed engineer, architect or building inspector — carry a sting as well, because NYSDOL says a building that qualifies for one must still be assumed to contain asbestos and demolished as an asbestos project unless a survey documents that there is none. An exemption from the survey is a presumption of asbestos, and that costs more than the survey would have. Most of the stock in and around Irondequoit went up long before 1974, and 9 by 9 vinyl floor tile and wrapped pipe insulation in the basement are ordinary here rather than exotic. We cannot take asbestos-containing material in any container. Asbestos in New York moves under a separate NYSDEC Part 364 permit and has to be handled by a NYSDOL-licensed asbestos contractor. The second rule is lead, and around here it is the default condition of the job rather than an edge case. Anything built before 1978 falls under the EPA RRP rule at 40 CFR Part 745, and window replacement and demolition are covered regardless of square footage, so a window job in Irondequoit is essentially always an RRP job. The City of Rochester has run its own lead ordinance since 2006 at Municipal Code Ch. 90, Art. III, tied directly to the certificate of occupancy, and the New York State Lead Rental Registry under Public Health Law § 1377 reaches rental property with two or more units built before 1980, with Rochester named among the state’s communities of concern. Paint scrapings, old window units and plaster off a pre-1980 rental are the debris of a regulated activity, and we would rather know that before the truck rolls than after. Before anything is dug, trenched, driven or a stump pulled, call UDig NY on 811. The notice window under 16 NYCRR § 753-3.1 is at least two but not more than 10 working days, so that call goes in the week before, not the morning of. Our permit and placement guide walks through the whole process, and refuse, recycling and right-of-way details are published by the City of Rochester.

The ground is the other local variable, and in New York it is not the tidy number people expect. New York publishes no statewide frost depth. Table R301.2(1) of the Residential Code of New York State, at 19 NYCRR Part 1220, leaves that cell for the municipality to fill in, and the State’s own guidance says “the local jurisdiction shall provide the minimum depth of footing below finish grade.” So the footing depth for a job in Irondequoit is a question for the building department that covers you, not something you read off a national chart. What is not in doubt is the climate: the ground here really freezes, footings go well below grade, and that is why full basements are near-universal in this housing stock. A cleanout in Irondequoit therefore starts a floor lower than a sizing guide written for the south would assume. The basement and the attic are the job, and what comes up those stairs is storm windows, paint tins, a workbench, furniture and thirty years of boxes. The housing itself is the second half of that. 53.7 percent of Rochester’s housing was built in 1939 or earlier, roughly nine houses in ten predate 1980, and this metro ranks eighth-oldest among large US metros. In the container that reads as stone and rubble foundations, balloon framing, plaster and wood lath instead of drywall, knob-and-tube wiring and cast-iron drain lines. Plaster and lath is dense, and it is the single commonest reason a container goes over payload while it still looks half full, which is why we would rather send a 10 yard twice than a 30 yard once on a gut job. Only 38.1 percent of city housing is owner-occupied, so inside the city line the typical residential job is a landlord turnover on a two-family up-and-down rather than a homeowner remodel, while out in the county towns it is more often a roof, a remodel or a landscape clear-out on a two-story detached house. Then there is the weather, which is the part of this market nobody else has to write about. 102.0 inches of snow is the 1991–2020 normal published by the National Weather Service in Buffalo, higher than any other US metro over a million people. January alone brings 27.4 inches across 17.6 snow days. The gradient inside the county is real: roughly 70 inches south of the city, about 90 in the city itself and over 120 along the lakeshore east of it, with about half of the annual total falling as ordinary storm snow and the rest as lake effect off Lake Ontario. Snow sitting in an open container is weight you pay to haul, so tarp it or lid it between loads. Access moves with the season too: snowbanks and the plow windrow narrow a drive that took a 30 yard in October, and on gravel or a shared drive we would rather move you a day than leave ruts through soft ground. Spring is the other pinch. Monroe County’s dominant soils are silt loams — Collamer and Niagara, with Honeoye the region’s signature series — wet in spring and soft under load. And New York runs no statewide frost law. Under Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1660(a)(11) each town board may “temporarily exclude from any portion of any town highway any vehicle with a gross weight of over four or more tons” when the thaw makes the road soft; the restriction “take[s] effect upon the erection of signs”; and the statute provides that such exclusions “shall not be construed to prevent the delivery or pickup of merchandise or other property.” So a March delivery in a Monroe County town is sometimes scheduled differently from the same delivery in July, and we watch for the signs rather than guess. Plywood goes under every wheel and under the rails, on every driveway placement, all year. Where the load ends up is the part people assume and get wrong, and here the answer sits unusually close to home. Monroe County owns Mill Seat Landfill, in the Town of Riga on the west side of the county; Waste Management operates it under a 49-year lease signed in 2002, its approved capacity is 1,945 tons a day and its permitted life runs through 2057. High Acres Landfill, run by Waste Management of New York, sits at the eastern edge of the county in Perinton. Disposal capacity for this market is inside the county line, which is not true of every Northeast city. But Mill Seat is “COMMERCIAL ACCOUNTS ONLY. NO RESIDENTIAL CUSTOMERS,” open Monday to Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. A homeowner in Irondequoit cannot drive a pickup there, and that is precisely why roll-off service exists in this county. Household quantities take a different route entirely. Those go to the Monroe County ecopark, 10 Avion Drive, Rochester NY 14624 — Wednesday 1:00 to 6:30 p.m. and Saturday 7:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., with an appointment required for household hazardous waste and walk-in service for electronics, appliances, pharmaceuticals, sharps, fluorescent lights, scrap metal, propane tanks, rechargeable batteries and textiles. Some items are fee-based and it is credit or debit only, and the ecopark is “for use by Monroe County residents only,” which covers everyone we deliver to. Paint, solvents, automotive fluids, batteries and pool chemicals never ride in one of our containers. That county layer is the thing to understand about working here. Monroe County is the working unit: it owns the landfill, runs the recycling center, runs the ecopark and runs the childhood lead program, and none of that stops at the city line. What does change at the town line is the street — the City wants that written right-of-way permit from the City Engineer, barricaded and lit after dark, while each town around it runs its own arrangements and its own seasonal overnight parking ban on dates and hours of its own choosing. That is one more argument for the driveway. Last, what has to come out of the load. New York has no waste-ban list; the phrase gets repeated on dumpster pages and it does not exist. What the state did instead was General Municipal Law § 120-aa, which ordered every municipality to adopt its own source-separation law by 1 September 1992 — Rochester complied with City Code Ch. 20, Art. IV, adopted 19 November 1991. The real bans are product by product, each in its own Title of ECL Article 27: electronics under Title 26 since 1 January 2015, rechargeable batteries under Title 18, waste tires under Title 19, and mercury thermostats under Title 29 since 2005 — and on that last one NYSDEC names contractors “demolishing buildings” specifically. Leftover paint has had PaintCare in New York since May 2022 under Title 20, so it goes to a drop-off site rather than into the box. And the City states the rest of it outright at § 20-15F: “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.” That sentence is the line where a roll-off starts.

Sizes we deliver to Irondequoit