Dumpster Rental in Upton, KY

Roll-off containers for Upton homes and jobsites

Upton is a small incorporated city of 704 people at the southern end of our range, down the I-65 and US 31W corridor. It has one geographic feature that makes it the most instructive small town on this site: Upton sits on a county line. Wikipedia and the Kentucky city list both place it on the Hardin–LaRue line; some other sources say Hardin and Hart instead. We could not resolve that conflict, so we write it as on a county line and leave the resolution to the county clerks, who have the maps.

Being unable to resolve it is not a problem for the work. It is the point. If a single small city can be genuinely ambiguous about which county it is in, then “which county are you in?” is a real question rather than a formality — and in Kentucky it is a question with consequences. Under KRS 224.43-315, every Kentucky county carries a statutory duty to provide a universal collection program for all municipal solid waste generated within it, and every person providing collection service “shall register annually with the counties.” Not with the state. With the county. Under 401 KAR 49:080 that registration is due by 1 February each year, to the county in which the service is provided. So the county your property is in is the county whose desk holds the answers, and on a line town that is not automatic.

Layered on top of the county question is the city question. Upton is incorporated, with its own municipal government, so a county franchise does not reach inside it in any event: Hardin County’s franchise area is published as “the unincorporated areas of Hardin County, Kentucky”, a boundary that traces directly to the 1979 Kentucky Court of Appeals decision brought by Elizabethtown, Radcliff and Vine Grove against the Hardin County Fiscal Court.

What we did not establish about Upton. Its ordinances. Container rules, street rules, hauler rules, burning rules, permit arrangements, and a published city phone number we would be willing to print. This page states none of them and says so plainly. Elizabethtown’s code is Elizabethtown’s, and reading it across to a city a long way down the corridor would be a guess dressed up as knowledge. Ask the city before anything goes in a street; for the Hardin County side, the Planning and Development Commission is on (270) 769-5479 and County Solid Waste on (270) 360-9207.

The work at this end is mostly the farm-and-old-house mix: outbuilding and barn demolition, machinery and shed clearance, land clearing along fence lines, estate work in long-held houses, and the roofs and remodels that a housing stock of this age keeps producing.

What we know about working in Upton

The honest split for a place on a line: what nobody can tell you from a desk in Elizabethtown, and what is the same in every Kentucky county.

Establish your county first. On a line town it is worth two minutes, because it decides which county’s collection program, which county’s registration desk, which county’s planning office and which county’s solid waste coordinator applies to you. We are not going to tell you which side of the line your parcel is on from here. The property record and the PVA map answer it exactly, and once you know, the rest of the answers follow. If it is the Hardin County side, the desks are Hardin County Planning and Development Commission, 150 N Provident Way Suite 225, (270) 769-5479 and Hardin County Solid Waste, (270) 360-9207.

And then establish the city line. Inside the Upton city limits, the city is the government for city matters. Outside them, the county is. Those are two different answers a few hundred feet apart, and this is a market where that sentence is literally true rather than rhetorical — on our own street north of Elizabethtown, one road at one ZIP code passes through three different jurisdictions.

The state layer does not care which line you are on. Kentucky’s building code is mandatory statewide under KRS 198B.050: the 2018 Kentucky Building Code and 2018 Kentucky Residential Code, both effective 3 December 2024. KRS 198B.060(8) then says a single-family dwelling is not required to be permitted or inspected “unless a local government has established a building inspection program” — Elizabethtown established one and named single-family dwellings expressly; whether Upton or the county you are in has, we could not establish, and it is the right question to ask before a demolition. On fire: Kentucky uses NFPA 1 (2018), not the International Fire Code, through 815 KAR 10:060; combustible waste and refuse is Chapter 19; and § 2(1) exempts “one (1) and two (2) family dwellings” from that regulation outright.

Materials, and Kentucky’s useful definition. 401 KAR 47:005 defines construction and demolition debris as waste from “the construction, remodeling, repair, and demolition of structures and roads” and includes uncontaminated vegetation from “land clearing and grubbing, utility line maintenance, and seasonal and storm related cleanup.” That covers a fence line, a hedgerow and a storm pile as well as a torn-out kitchen. It does not cover liquids, paint, oil, antifreeze, fuel, solvent, pressurized cylinders or batteries — none of which go in a container here, on karst ground where the Energy and Environment Cabinet warns that water moves fast enough through underground conduits to make the terrain “sensitive to groundwater pollution.” Tires are Kentucky’s one verified restriction: KRS 224.50-856, permitted facilities only, and more than 50 puts you inside the transporter rules. On a farm clear-out, count them before you start.

The cost element nobody can negotiate. Kentucky charges a $1.75-per-ton environmental remediation fee under KRS 224.43-500 on waste disposed in the Commonwealth, and it funds the Kentucky Pride Fund — used to clean up closed landfills and to eliminate illegal open dumps. Every legally disposed ton pays into it and every dumped ton does not. We will not quote you a tipping fee or a gate rate on this site, but that is a real, published, statutory piece of what disposal costs anywhere in Kentucky, and it is one reason a load that goes somewhere lawful costs what it costs.

Old buildings. About two in five Hardin County homes were built before 1980, the biggest single decade being the 1970s. The federal lead rule uses 1978, which is a different year, so much of that stock is inside it: paid work disturbing painted surfaces needs an EPA-certified firm, since Kentucky is not an EPA-authorized RRP state, though Kentucky does run lead abatement certification itself. Asbestos: the Commonwealth’s page says removal and disposal from “single-family homes or apartments of four or less units is not regulated under Kentucky law”, which is about notification only. Test before you demolish; bigger buildings notify under 401 KAR 58:025 at least 10 working days ahead, (502) 564-3999. And before any digging, Kentucky 811: two full working days, a 21-day ticket, an 18-inch hand-dig tolerance zone.

• CountyHardin County
• Run from our yardAt the far southern end of the county, down the I-65 and US 31W corridor from the yard
• Main routesI-65 south past the Sonora and Upton interchanges
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Upton is the far end of our regular range and we schedule it rather than promising it, because one trip down and back is most of a working day and we would rather set a time you can rely on than a time we have to move. We book the set and the pull together on runs like this. In town, the constraint is nearly always an older drive — width, the turn in off the street, the apron and the overhead. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear air so the hoist can stand it up as it comes off the rails; a 15 is the practical answer where the lot is tight. Out on the farms the surface decides everything: a lane that carries a pickup and a trailer year-round is not the same test as a loaded roll-off coming back out after rain, and the damage on soft ground is the point load under the rails, not the gross weight. We carry plywood and use it. This county gets around fifty inches of rain a year with no dry season, so an open box gains weight in water on a long job — cover it. For a farmyard set we want a straight pull-out, firm ground, clearance from low eaves and overhead drops, and a spot the crew can reach without carrying debris round a corner. Tell us the gate width, the surface and the grade before we roll. (270) 900-6891.

Routes we run: I-65 south past the Sonora and Upton interchanges, US 31W south the full length of the Dixie corridor, the county roads running east and west from the town, the section roads north toward Sonora and White Mills, the connector roads south and east toward Munfordville and Hodgenville.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Upton

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. In Upton the answer is a city government — and it is not Elizabethtown’s. Upton is an home rule class city in Hardin County with a hall of its own, a council of its own and decisions of its own to make, and none of those decisions were made in Elizabethtown. That is the single most useful sentence on this page, and the rest of it is spent making sure we do not undermine it by guessing.

Upton is the one city we serve where the county underneath you is itself in question. The sources we could reach do not agree on which two counties the line belongs to, so we write it as a county line and leave the resolution to the clerks who hold the maps. That is not a gap in the page — it is the clearest possible argument for asking rather than assuming. There are four kinds of desk in this market and every job in it belongs to exactly one of them: the City of Elizabethtown for an address inside the Elizabethtown line, the city’s own hall for an address inside Upton, the Hardin County Planning and Development Commission, 150 N Provident Way, Suite 225, on (270) 769-5479 for unincorporated Hardin County, and the installation itself for anything on federal ground. On a numbered state route it is a fifth desk again, and that one is the Commonwealth’s. Give us the address and we will tell you which of them you are dealing with before a truck is loaded.

Here is the part we will not fudge. Elizabethtown has written an unusual amount down, and we quote it by section elsewhere on this site because down there we actually can. § 92.030 makes a violation of the garbage subchapter “a public nuisance” outright. § 92.031(F) makes “failure to dispose of all garbage, debris and rubbish at least one time per week” a violation in itself — so letting material pile up in the yard is the offense, before anybody complains about it. § 92.031(B) requires anything “that can be blown away by the wind” to be in a covered container, and § 92.031(E) makes dumping on any premises in the city a violation “with or without the consent of the owner.” On the building side, § 150.16 publishes the fees as they stand in the code — a residential demolition permit at $50, a commercial one at $100, and no fee at all on construction work valued under $10,000, which is not the same thing as no permit. § 154.011 voids a permit if the work is “suspended or abandoned for a period of six months.” And § 154.135(F) is the one that names our own equipment: it requires that trash collection areas “shall not be visible from a street” and sets them “no closer than 20 feet of any street, public sidewalk or pedestrian walkway”, using the words “trash dumpsters” expressly. Read that last one carefully: it is a zoning design standard for permanent trash enclosures on commercial and multifamily sites, judged at development-plan stage. It is not a rule that your roll-off has to stand twenty feet off the street, and we will not let anyone read it that way. Every line of that is City of Elizabethtown code and every line of it stops at the City of Elizabethtown’s boundary. We set it out on a Upton page so you can see the exact shape of what does not apply to you — and so that nobody reads a section number off this site and takes it to a Upton inspector. What Upton requires for a container in its street, whether its own code addresses containers at all, and what it does about hauler licensing or household collection, we did not establish. Four open questions, and we would rather hand you four than answer them from memory. “We could not find one” is not “there is none.” We did not establish a published phone number for the City of Upton that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns for a small Kentucky city is aggregator listings rather than the city’s own page, and a wrong number printed confidently is worse than no number at all — so take these questions to City Hall directly, at the courthouse or the city building. Underneath the city sits the county, and that layer we can describe: Elizabethtown is the Hardin County seat, so the county offices sit in the same town as our yard: the Fiscal Court at 150 N Provident Way, with Judge-Executive Keith Taul on (270) 765-2350 and eight magistrates sitting as the county’s legislative body. The county’s own page is careful to note that the Judge-Executive has “no judicial responsibilities or enforcement authority” in spite of the title, which tells you something about how often people ring the wrong desk.

Now the part most companies in this trade skip. Start with the line that is safe everywhere, because it covers the overwhelming majority of what we set: on private property you control — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permission is in play at all. Not the city’s, not the county’s, not the Commonwealth’s. What can still apply on private ground is your deed restrictions, a landlord’s consent, and on a commercial building the fire code — and none of those is a permit counter.

The street case is different, and in Upton it goes to Upton. If any part of the container will stand in a street, an alley, a sidewalk or the verge, that is right-of-way, and inside an incorporated city the right-of-way belongs to the city rather than to the county. We did not read Upton’s code and we will not print an Upton fee, form, tier or turnaround we have not read. Put that question to Upton City Hall before the truck is booked rather than after — and to them, not to us, because it is their street. There is one important exception, and it is the one people get wrong most often: a numbered route through town is usually the Commonwealth’s, not the city’s. US 31W, US 62, US 31E, I-65 and the Parkways are state highways, and anything placed in a state highway right-of-way is a Kentucky Transportation Cabinet matter — the encroachment form is TC 99-1, designated by 603 KAR 5:120, and the local office is District 4, 310 Valley Creek Road, Elizabethtown, (270) 766-5146. We did not establish that a temporary container is itself a listed encroachment, so we will not say the Cabinet requires a permit for one; we will say the Cabinet is the desk that answers for a state route, and that city hall is not. And whatever the surface, ring Kentucky 811 before anything is dug.

One rule follows the container rather than the address, and Kentucky writes it in a way that catches out anybody who has worked in another state. The Commonwealth does not use the model fire code most of the country adopts. Its Standards of Safety at 815 KAR 10:060 adopt NFPA 1 (2018), and combustible waste and refuse is its Chapter 19 — the parent chapter, which is as far as we are prepared to take it in print. We did not verify a subsection, we did not verify a clearance measured in feet, and we are not going to publish either one off a forum post. What we will publish is the exemption, because it decides most of the jobs on this page: § 2(1) of that regulation applies it to all buildings “except one (1) and two (2) family dwellings.” A container on a driveway at a single-family house is outside its reach altogether. Against a commercial building, a school or a larger apartment block it is not, and then the only question that matters is who looks at it. Which fire officials have jurisdiction in Upton, and what the city has adopted on top of the Commonwealth’s standards, we did not establish and will not characterize. That authority is the desk to ask before a container goes tight against a commercial building, and it is not Elizabethtown’s fire department. For a picture of what a nameable fire authority looks like: Elizabethtown adopts both the national fire codes and the Kentucky Standards of Safety by reference at Chapter 93 of its code, and runs its own department — Chief Mark Malone, three stations on Ring Road and East Dixie Avenue, 74 personnel, ISO Class 2, with a Fire Prevention division that does home and business inspections on (270) 765-2121. That is one desk, in one city, and it is the only one on this site we can name.

Two questions follow the load rather than the address, and neither is settled at a city hall. The first is where a load can lawfully go. Kentucky permits disposal facilities in classes — contained, construction and demolition debris, inert, residual and special waste — and it issues a separate permit class for construction and demolition debris landfills. That is why “where does it go?” has a genuinely different answer for a kitchen remodel than for a roof tear-off, and why we ask what is going in the box while we are quoting it rather than finding out at the scale. Hardin County operates its own permitted contained landfill on Audubon Trace in Elizabethtown, and we name it here as public infrastructure and nothing more — its hours, gate rules and accepted materials we could not establish, so ask the county on (270) 360-9207 rather than driving over on spec. The one disposal figure we will ever publish is statutory rather than commercial: Kentucky charges a $1.75-per-ton environmental remediation fee under KRS 224.43-500, and it funds the Kentucky Pride Fund, which pays to clean up closed landfills and eliminate illegal open dumps. Every legally disposed ton pays into that. Every fly-tipped ton does not.

The second is what the box may carry, and the honest answer is that the material rules barely move across this whole service area while the government rules move constantly. What goes in is the dry, solid remainder of a building project — the stud, the sheet, the board, the shingle, the fixture, the fence and the storm-thrown limb. What stays out, always and everywhere: liquids of any kind, paint, oil, antifreeze, fuel, solvent, pressurized cylinders, batteries, and anything still wet. And one piece of ordinary sense that Elizabethtown happens to have written into law for its own addresses — § 92.031(A) gives you 96 consecutive hours for anything “subject to decay”, and only in a tightly covered container. Whether or not that section reaches you, the advice behind it does: bag the kitchen waste for your ordinary collection and keep the container for the debris, because a roll-off standing on a drive for a week is not a bin.

Then there are the City of Elizabethtown’s three free collection programs, which are the best argument for a container anybody has ever made and the City makes it without meaning to. Read the following as a description of the government next door rather than as your own rulebook, because inside Upton it is neither. Spring Clean-Up 2026 runs 30 March through 1 May for junk and debris, with appliances collected 27 April to 1 May on a call-in basis and freon-containing units needing a removal tag first; the collection areas are drawn geographically, west and east of US 31-W and north and south of KY 1357 or KY 251. And the published refusal list reads: “No garbage, hazardous materials, liquids (paints, oil, antifreeze, etc.), construction debris, tires, or automobiles.” Brush collection takes only “debris resulting from trees and shrubs which have been pruned or trimmed”, under twelve inches in diameter and five feet in length, on a four-week rotating schedule across four areas that has been in place since 1 October 2024; it expressly “does not include collection of cut trees and shrubs or debris resulting from the clearing of land”, oversize material goes to the Public Works facility on Nicholas Street, and the sentence that ends the argument is the City’s own: “Licensed contractors must remove and dispose of debris from their own work professionally.” Leaf pick-up is a fall program, clear bags under 50 pounds, and the City asks you to “separate brush and debris from loose leaves piles.” Those dates and that rotation move, so confirm current dates with Elizabethtown Public Works, 301 Waterworks Drive, on (270) 737-7890 — Director Don Hill’s department — rather than trusting a page you read in another season.

What the box stands on settles more arguments here than what size it is, and the reason is under the whole county rather than on top of it. This is limestone country: the Kentucky Geological Survey puts it plainly that “about 55 percent of Kentucky is underlain by rocks that could develop karst terrain” and “25 percent of the state is known to have well-developed karst features” — and the eight-county Lincoln Trail region took $293,984 of FEMA money so that KGS could build it a karst hazard mitigation plan with LiDAR. Four things we will not do with any of that, and they matter more than the geology. We will not tell you a truck causes a sinkhole, because no agency says it and KGS attributes collapse to water and soil piping. We will not read a map and tell you your property is or is not at risk, because KGS says its own sinkhole data is “not recommended for predicting future subsidence.” We will not publish a percentage or a sinkhole count for this county, because there is not an honest one to publish. And we are not geologists, which is the shortest of the four and the most important. What we do is place a loaded container on the firmest, best-drained surface available, put plywood under the rails, and keep every liquid out of it — the Energy and Environment Cabinet describes karst as “sensitive to groundwater pollution” for a reason.

Water is the other half of that, and here it is a scheduling fact rather than a warning. There is no dry month in this county, but there is a wettest and a driest, and they are further apart than people assume: May averages around 5.82 inches of rain and September around 3.14. May is also when renovation season starts, which is why the busiest weeks of our year are the wettest ones. September is the quiet secret of the calendar here — the driest month, still mild, and the best window in the year for outdoor demolition, land clearing and anything that wants the ground to stay firm under a loaded truck. If your job can move, move it there. And whenever it runs, cover the load: a container left open through a wet spell collects water, water is weight, and weight is what disposal is billed on.

Winter here is not a snow problem. This part of Kentucky averages only about five inches of snow in a year against roughly fifty inches of rain, and December to February lows sit around 23 to 27 degrees — cold enough to freeze what fell and thaw it again by afternoon. The risk that actually stops work in this part of Kentucky is ice. The January 2009 ice storm is the benchmark people still measure against. It hit central Kentucky broadly — the weather service describes the region rather than this county, and we are not going to invent a local ice figure we do not have. Ice debris is its own category: limb wood tangled with gutter, siding, fence and roofing, arriving all at once across a whole neighborhood, and none of it fits a brush program designed for pruned trimmings. Forecasts and warnings for every county on this site come from NWS Louisville — the Louisville forecast office, not the Paducah one, which is a mistake we see made about this county constantly.

The last piece is the housing, because it decides what comes out of it. Hardin County holds about 51,149 housing units across 623.40 square miles, and it reportedly borders more counties than any other in the Commonwealth — with a 2020 population of 110,702 and a 2025 estimate of 113,482. Elizabethtown itself covers 27.18 square miles and is estimated at 35,448, up close to 13 percent since 2020. About two in five homes in the county went up before 1980, and the single biggest decade is the 1970s, so a large share of the stock sits on the older side of the federal lead rule’s 1978 line. Translated into containers that means two different loads on two different streets: plaster, cast iron, layered shingle and pre-1978 paint on one, and first-remodel tidy-up on the other. The older one weighs considerably more, and it is the one we get called for. One footnote for anybody opening up a lower level: this is a radon Zone 2 county, and we quote EPA rather than a map on it — EPA’s own position is that “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.” A zone number is not a risk finding and we do not use it as one.

Collection is the last of the four questions, and it is the one where the four tiers on this site part company completely. The county franchise stops at the Upton city line. Hardin County’s franchise area is “the unincorporated areas of Hardin County, Kentucky”, and Upton is not unincorporated. What the city itself does about household collection is the city’s own decision and we did not establish it. What we will not do is describe somebody else’s arrangement as though it were ours. What the county runs instead of a curbside service for the awkward material is drop-off and events. Hardin County runs seven recycling drop-offs, open around the clock, and it is worth knowing where they are before you load a trunk: Eastview, Elizabethtown, the Farmers Market, Glendale, Radcliff, Sonora and Vine Grove. They are narrow — four material streams and nothing else — and the county writes the limit down rather than leaving it to be discovered. The routes for paint, chemicals, batteries and electronics are events rather than places, and they come round once a year. Solid Waste Coordinator Stephanie Givens and the department are at 150 N Provident Way, Suite 223, on (270) 360-9207. None of that is a route for renovation debris, and none of it is open on the afternoon you finish a demolition.

Two things then travel with the load rather than with the address, and they are the two that decide what you actually pay for. The first is where it can go, which is a question of permit class rather than of distance. The second is what it weighs, because disposal is billed by weight and density beats volume every time — a container of household contents and a container of tile, mortar and broken concrete are the same box and not remotely the same job. That is why the conversation about contents comes before the quote rather than after it, and why the honest answer to “what size?” sometimes runs downward: on heavy material, take the smaller box twice. Roof tear-off is the standard example and it is not close — shingle reaches lawful payload while there is still room above the rails, so it never belongs in a 30 or a 40. Tell us the material and we will size it on the phone. That one belongs to Upton City Hall as well.

Sizes we deliver to Upton