Dumpster Rental in New Britain, CT

Roll-off containers for New Britain homes and jobsites

New Britain is a city, not a town, and that matters more than it sounds. It is the second-largest municipality we serve, it has a dense urban core, and its housing and its problems look far more like Hartford’s than like the suburban towns in between. Hardware City built locks, tools and hardware on an industrial scale — Stanley is still headquartered here — and it drew the workforce that filled the multifamily neighbourhoods around Broad Street, the East Side and Arch Street, much of it built before 1940 in the same era and the same idiom as Hartford’s three-storey multifamily stock.

That gives us a particular kind of customer. New Britain is a landlord’s city as much as a homeowner’s, and the work is turnovers, gut renovations and multifamily maintenance rather than garage clearances. A three-storey six-unit building being turned over produces carpet, cabinets, appliances, plaster, lath and forty years of tenants’ leavings, and it produces them on a street where parking is tight on both sides and the drive, if there is one, is a single-width strip beside the building.

The rest of the city is easier. Belvidere and the streets around Walnut Hill Park hold larger single-family houses on proper lots. The southern and western edges have post-war and modern development with normal drives. Central Connecticut State University sits on the northern side and generates its own institutional work. Under all of it, a 42-inch frost line and full basements, and above it the same New England hardwood canopy — maple, oak, ash — that comes down in every serious wind. What the city does not have, any more than Hartford does, is a municipal answer for renovation debris — a landlord turning over a unit is a private hauling customer from the first skip-load, and that is the work we do here week in and week out.

What we know about working in New Britain

Placement is the real work in New Britain, because the older multifamily streets were laid out before anyone owned a car, let alone two per unit. A single-width side drive will usually take a 15 but not a 30, and the five-foot rule bites hard: IFC 2021 §304.3.3, as adopted in Connecticut, says a container of 1.5 cubic yards or more must not be stored in a building or placed within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. Between two close-set wood-framed buildings there often is not five feet, and the answer is the front of the drive or the kerb. Putting a box in the street is a municipal question and New Britain’s own arrangements apply — Hartford’s Obstruction Permit and its $50 fee are Hartford’s, and every one of Connecticut’s 169 municipalities writes its own. Call the city before you book a street set. On the load, a multifamily turnover goes mixed into one roll-off, which is what CT DEEP recommends, with corrugated cardboard and scrap metal separated out under CGS §22a-241b. Mattresses come out too and cost nothing to recycle, because Connecticut wrote the first mattress stewardship law in the country in Public Act 13-42 and the fee was paid at purchase. Electronics are a genuine disposal ban under CGS §22a-636. And on a pre-1940 building, assume lead paint and test anything that might be asbestos before it is disturbed — Connecticut’s rules include residential property expressly. See our notes on multifamily turnovers.

• Regionthe Capitol Region
• Distance from our yard10 miles south-west of our Ledyard Street yard
• Main routesNew Britain Avenue west and south out of Hartford, which is the old road and goes where the name says
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

New Britain Avenue west and south out of Hartford is the old road and still the simplest, taking about twenty-five minutes off-peak. I-84 west to the Route 72 interchange is faster in traffic and puts us straight into the middle of the city. Route 9 south serves the southern and eastern edges, and Route 175 crosses the town toward the Newington side. On the multifamily streets we want to know about parking before we commit a truck — a box we cannot swap because cars have closed the approach is nobody’s idea of a good week. Before booking: address, unit count, where the box will sit, drive width, overhead clearance and what is going in.

Routes we run: New Britain Avenue west and south out of Hartford, which is the old road and goes where the name says, I-84 west to the Route 72 interchange and west into the middle of New Britain, Route 9 south from the Route 72 junction for the southern and eastern edges of the city, Route 175 west across the town for the Newington side and the eastern neighbourhoods.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in New Britain

On a private driveway in New Britain the placement question is not really a permit question at all, and that surprises nearly everybody. Connecticut has no per-dumpster fire permit. The only rubbish entry in the state fire code permit table is a permit to operate a commercial rubbish-handling business, and that one is ours to hold rather than yours. What the state has instead is a placement rule. Under IFC 2021 §304.3.3, adopted in the 2022 Connecticut State Fire Safety Code, a container with an individual capacity of 1.5 cubic yards or more must not be stored in a building or placed within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. Five feet is the figure, whatever the dumpster pages written for other states tell you. Every roll-off we run is well over 1.5 cubic yards, so the rule reaches a 10 yard in a New Britain driveway just as much as a 40 yard on a commercial site, and it is the reason the open side of the drive beats the narrow gap beside the house. Keep the box clear of exits, fire-apparatus access and hydrants as well, and no flammable or combustible liquids go in it. A local fire marshal can add requirements of his own, so if the only workable spot is tight against the building, it is worth a call to the fire marshal covering New Britain before we deliver. For a container that has to sit in the public way in Hartford the instrument is the Obstruction Permit from the city’s Public Works Permit Division — temporary obstruction of the public right-of-way, $50 plus $0.03 per square foot per day under the published Rules and Specifications, with a $10,000 performance bond and a certificate of liability insurance. That document never uses the word dumpster, so ring the Permit Division on 860-757-9970 and ask how they want it handled. Outside Hartford the same call goes to the town’s own public works or engineering office, because the answer follows the address rather than any county line. Sidewalks, hydrants and fire lanes stay clear either way. Sort the approval before you book the delivery. It is a ten-minute call that saves a week.

Two more rules reach every job we run, and both are state rules rather than local ones. The first is asbestos, and Connecticut splits it three ways. The Department of Public Health takes the abatement notification and licenses the people who do the work, on ten days’ notice. CT DEEP issues the $300 Special Waste and Asbestos Disposal Authorization that lets the material move. The DAS Office of the State Fire Marshal licenses demolition contractors. The trap on an older New Britain house is that Connecticut is stricter than the federal rule: RCSA §19a-332a-1 defines a facility to include residential buildings, single-family homes expressly included, so there is no owner-occupied carve-out here, and a demolition notification is required for any structure taken down, whether or not asbestos is present. CT DPH publishes a factsheet on asbestos-containing siding shingles in particular, which is a live issue on pre-1940 stock. We cannot take asbestos-containing material in any container. Anything built before 1978 also carries lead paint under the federal RRP rule, and lead paint chips are one of the materials Hartford’s bulky programme refuses outright. The second rule is what may not ride in a construction load: CGS §22a-208x excludes asbestos, clean fill, hazardous waste, radioactive material and liquids — adhesives, paints, oils and tars from construction and demolition waste, and corrugated cardboard and scrap metal are mandatory recyclables under CGS §22a-241b, so they come out of the load and cannot be mixed back in once they are separated. Everything else can be commingled — CT DEEP’s own guidance is that most construction waste is best managed in one roll-off taken to a processing facility. That is why we ask what is going in the box before we quote, and it is not fussiness. Before anything is dug, trenched or a stump pulled, call Call Before You Dig on 811, as CGS §16-345 et seq. requires; Connecticut is CBYD territory. Our permit and placement guide walks through the whole process, and collection, drop-off and bulk-item details are published by the City of Hartford.

The ground is the other local variable, and here it is the frost line that decides both the container size and the approach. Connecticut works to a 42-inch frost depth, so footings in New Britain reach three and a half feet regardless of what sits on top — and once the hole is that deep, a full basement costs almost nothing more, which is why so much of the pre-war housing here has one. Two practical consequences follow. A cleanout 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 the bulkhead stairs is storm windows, paint tins, furniture, a workbench and thirty years of boxes. And frost heave, the spring thaw and plain groundwater keep the heavy work coming — footing and foundation spoil, broken concrete and brick out of a cellar floor or a front walk, plaster off a gutted six-family, and wet basement contents after water has come in. All of that is heavy for its volume, so it rides in a small container, often in two hauls rather than one big box, and the wet clay it comes out of weighs a good deal more in April than it does in August. Access moves with the season as well: snowbanks and the plough windrow narrow a drive that took a 30 yard in October, granite kerbing and cars parked both sides of the street decide how much swing the truck has on the older blocks, shared drives between multifamily houses are tighter than they look, and on gravel approaches we would rather move you a day than leave ruts through soft spring ground. Where it all ends up is the part people assume and get wrong. The MIRA trash-to-energy plant in Hartford’s South Meadows has closed, Connecticut has no active MSW landfills, and the state exports a large share of its municipal solid waste — so disposal here is a distance and logistics problem rather than a question of what is banned. A mixed construction load in one box is perfectly legal, and it is what CT DEEP recommends. Household quantities are a different route: Hartford residents take those to the Bulky Waste and Recycling Center, 180 Leibert Road, Tuesday to Saturday, 8:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., on a green permit for recyclables, free; a blue residential permit at $10.00 for four visits; or a red commercial permit at $50.00 plus a per-load charge — half a ton $40, three-quarters $60, a ton $85 — and that red permit names handymen and landscapers and stops at a one-ton load or a 16-foot trailer. Mattresses and electronics are free there, because Connecticut’s producer-funded stewardship programmes pay for them. Paint, solvents, automotive fluids, batteries and pool chemicals never ride in a container: household hazardous waste for Hartford goes to the MDC Operations Facility at 125 Maxim Road. Every town around us answers all of this differently, because Connecticut has 169 towns, each running its own solid waste arrangements with no county layer above them — the answer changes at the town line.

Sizes we deliver to New Britain