Editorial policy

The rule behind every listing: publish only what can be traced to a source, show the source, and say plainly when something is not known. A missing fee is better than an invented one.

Where facility data comes from

• U.S. EPA Disaster Debris Recovery Tool (DDRT). A public-domain national database of landfills, transfer stations, construction debris, composting, hazardous waste and tire facilities compiled from state and federal sources. It supplies most names, addresses, coordinates and facility types. About DDRT.
• OpenStreetMap. Community map data (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL) that adds sites DDRT lacks, especially county convenience centers and transfer stations, and sometimes hours and operators.
• EPA Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) data on municipal landfills, where it applies.
• Facility websites. Hours, fees, accepted and refused materials, residency and contractor rules and payment methods are read from the operator's own pages and fee schedules (web pages or PDFs), which for most public sites are the county or city government's pages.
• Public map listings found through web search, used for phone numbers, websites and posted hours when the operator's site does not give them. A map listing is used only when it is a waste facility (filed under a waste category, or named as one) with a matching name at the site; a business that merely shares the street address, a phone number from another state's area code, and directory or regulator pages offered as the “website” are all rejected.

In practice most listings rest on EPA DDRT and OpenStreetMap: they supply nearly every location and facility type and most accepted-materials lists (as facility-type flags or map tags, not a site's own list). Hours come mostly from OpenStreetMap and map listings, and fees only from operators that publish a fee page we have read so far. Each listing's “About this listing” box names exactly which of these it rests on.

Matching and placing records

The same site often appears in several sources under slightly different names. Records are matched by distance between their coordinates and similarity of their names, then merged into one listing that keeps every source it came from. Sites on one campus whose names state different roles (a landfill and the convenience center or household hazardous waste building beside it) stay separate listings, and a listing takes its hours, phone and map point only from records of the facility it is named after. Counties are assigned from each site's coordinates.

Source coordinates are checked against the stated city. When they sit 50 km or more from it and the facility's own name points to the city, the record's coordinates belonged to another site: the map then shows the town centre, the listing says its location is approximate, directions use the street address, and the page is kept out of search until the location is confirmed.

How fees are read

• Fees are copied as the facility words them (“Mixed C&D, $52 per ton”), with the unit and any condition.
• Every fee table links to the page it was read from and shows the date it was checked.
• Some sites are tagged as free of charge on OpenStreetMap. That tag comes from map editors, not the operator, so it is never shown as a published fee: the listing says OpenStreetMap lists the site as free, links the map record and asks you to confirm, and the tag is left out of page titles and summaries.
• A language model reads the fee page and lists the fees, materials and rules it states. Code then checks each fee's numbers and wording against the page text and drops anything it cannot find there, anything from a schedule older than 2023, and anything that belongs to a different facility on the same page.
• We never estimate a facility's fee. If a facility publishes none, the listing says “not published”.
• The dump fee calculator is a separate estimate built from published volume-to-weight factors; its sources are listed on the tool.

Hours and “open now”

Hours come from OpenStreetMap, a public map listing or the facility. The open-now badge is worked out in your browser from those hours and the facility's own time zone, whatever time zone you are in. It is hidden whenever the hours are seasonal, limited to certain weeks (“1st and 3rd Saturday”), carry a note we cannot read, run past midnight without saying so, or the facility's time zone is not certain. Gates often close before the posted time, so call ahead.

Dates on a listing

Each listing shows the date of its newest source record, the date we last added hours, fees or contact details to it (when we have), and the date it was first listed here. A listing is never dated “updated” just because the site was rebuilt.

What we do not publish

• No invented hours, fees, materials, ratings or reviews, and no placeholder listings.
• No places the public cannot take waste to, even when a source lists them: industrial and medical waste firms, junk-removal and dumpster companies, road-department yards, military sites, temporary disaster-debris sites, and consultants' or contractors' offices.
• A rating from a public map listing appears only when it rests on at least 5 reviews, and never in structured data.
• No paid placement. Facilities cannot buy a listing or a position.

Which pages search engines see

A listing is offered to search engines only when it carries something a visitor can act on (posted hours or a fee published by the operator), is not marked closed, has a confirmed map location, and rests on a source newer than EPA's 2020 baseline records. Thinner listings stay visible on the site, so people can still find a site's location, but they are marked noindex until they gain that information, and they carry no advertising. A county page is offered when it lists at least two such listings, or one with posted hours or a published fee; a state's construction debris page needs at least two.

Guides

Every figure and rule in a guide is tied to a source listed at the end of it, and each guide shows the date it was last updated.

Corrections and removal

Email contact@ff5construction.com or use the link on any listing. Details are on the corrections page.