Service area
Where We Deliver — Elizabethtown, Hardin County & the Lincoln Trail region
Seventeen places, delivered from our yard here in Elizabethtown — and they are not one county and not one rulebook. They sort into three tiers, and the tier is the answer. Five are incorporated cities in Hardin County — Radcliff, Vine Grove, Sonora, West Point and Upton — each with a city hall of its own that is not Elizabethtown’s. Six are incorporated cities in surrounding counties, every one of them a county seat, where a different county means a different collection arrangement, different drop-offs and a different planning desk. Six have no city hall at all: Rineyville, Cecilia, Glendale, Stephensburg and White Mills are unincorporated Hardin County, where the County is the answer — and Fort Knox is neither city nor county, because it is a United States Army installation on federal ground. That is why each place below carries a page of its own instead of a line in a list.
By locality
Grouped by county, because the county is what changes first
The tiers read straight off this list. Hardin County holds eleven of the seventeen — the five incorporated cities, the five unincorporated communities, and part of Fort Knox. The other six sit in LaRue, Meade, Nelson, Grayson, Bullitt and Hart counties, and every one of those six towns is the seat of the county it is in, which is genuinely useful: the county government that answers for collection, planning and solid waste keeps its offices in that same town. Kentucky puts the universal collection duty on every county separately, under KRS 224.43-315, and 401 KAR 49:080 requires a collector to register with the county it serves, annually, by 1 February. Cross a county line and you have crossed into a different set of those arrangements. We will tell you which county you are standing in and give you its desk. We will not tell you Hardin County’s answers apply there.
Hardin County
LaRue County
Meade County
Nelson County
Grayson County
Bullitt County
Hart County
Bullitt, Hardin and Meade counties
At a glance
Where each one sits, and how we get there
Every distance on this site is straight-line. We do not publish drive times, and the reason is the map: the Fort Knox reservation, the Ohio River and the hill country west of the Dixie corridor all mean a real route can be a good deal longer than a ruler suggests.
| City, community or installation | County | From our yard | Main route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radcliff | Hardin County | Straight up US 31W from the yard, past the point where the Elizabethtown line runs out | US 31W / North Dixie Highway, the whole length of the corridor from our yard north |
| Vine Grove | Hardin County | West of the Dixie corridor, a short run out from the yard toward the Fort Knox side of the county | KY 1500 and the Radcliff connectors in from the Dixie corridor |
| Sonora | Hardin County | South of Elizabethtown, down the I-65 and US 31W corridor from the yard | I-65 south from Elizabethtown and the Sonora interchange |
| West Point | Hardin County | North up the county at the river end, past the Fort Knox reservation from the yard | US 31W north up the Dixie corridor and on toward the river end of the county |
| Upton | Hardin County | At the far southern end of the county, down the I-65 and US 31W corridor from the yard | I-65 south past the Sonora and Upton interchanges |
| Hodgenville | LaRue County | South-east of Elizabethtown, out of Hardin County altogether and into LaRue | US 31E and the roads south-east out of Elizabethtown |
| Brandenburg | Meade County | North-west of us at the Ohio River, out of Hardin County and into Meade | the routes north-west out of Hardin County toward the river |
| Bardstown | Nelson County | East of Elizabethtown, out of Hardin County and over into Nelson | the Bluegrass Parkway and the routes east out of Elizabethtown |
| Leitchfield | Grayson County | West of Elizabethtown, out of Hardin County and into Grayson | the Western Kentucky Parkway and the routes west out of Elizabethtown |
| Shepherdsville | Bullitt County | North-east of us at the edge of our range, out of Hardin County and into Bullitt | I-65 north-east from Elizabethtown to the Bullitt County exits |
| Munfordville | Hart County | The farthest regular run we make, south down the I-65 corridor into Hart County | I-65 south the length of the corridor from Elizabethtown |
| Rineyville | Hardin County | The closest place on this site to our yard, west of the Dixie corridor on the county roads | the county roads west off the Dixie corridor from the yard |
| Cecilia | Hardin County | West of Elizabethtown on the county roads, a short run out from the yard | US 62 west out of Elizabethtown |
| Glendale | Hardin County | South of Elizabethtown off the I-65 corridor, a straightforward run from the yard | I-65 south from Elizabethtown to the Glendale interchange |
| Stephensburg | Hardin County | South-west of Elizabethtown on the county roads, an easy run out from the yard | the county roads south-west out of Elizabethtown |
| White Mills | Hardin County | West of Elizabethtown out toward the Nolin River, on the county roads from the yard | the county roads west from Elizabethtown toward the river country |
| Fort Knox | Bullitt, Hardin and Meade counties | North-west of Elizabethtown, and the largest single thing between us and the river | US 31W north up the Dixie corridor from the yard |
Local knowledge
Three tiers, and three genuinely different answers
Three tiers, and the tier is the answer
Wherever it can be managed the box goes on your own ground, with plywood under every wheel and rail. It is the moment any part of the job touches public ground, or needs a permit, that it matters whose government you are standing in front of — and in this market that is three separate questions rather than one. Tier one: the five incorporated Hardin County cities. Radcliff, Vine Grove, Sonora, West Point and Upton each have a hall of their own. Two of them are not incidental to this site’s argument: Radcliff and Vine Grove were two of the three cities that took the Hardin County Fiscal Court to court in 1979, in the Kentucky Court of Appeals decision holding that counties lack unilateral authority to franchise garbage collection inside city boundaries and that cities keep “power over collection of garbage within their limits” — Elizabethtown was the third city. We describe that decision rather than cite it, because we could not verify a reporter citation and we are not going to invent one. We have verified halls and numbers for two of the five: Radcliff, 411 West Lincoln Trail Boulevard, (270) 351-4714, and Vine Grove, 300 West Main Street, (270) 877-2422. For Sonora, West Point and Upton we could not find a published number we would stand behind — which is not the same as saying there is none, so ring the city and ask. And for all five the standing rule holds: nothing we read establishes any of their ordinances, permits or container rules, so we state none, and we do not assume Elizabethtown’s travel across a boundary. Tier two: the six cities in surrounding counties. Hodgenville in LaRue, Brandenburg in Meade, Bardstown in Nelson, Leitchfield in Grayson, Shepherdsville in Bullitt and Munfordville in Hart. A different county is a different world on paper: a different universal collection arrangement, a different set of drop-offs, a different solid waste office and a different planning desk. Check with the city, and check with that county. Tier three: the six with no city hall at all. Rineyville, Cecilia, Glendale, Stephensburg and White Mills are unincorporated Hardin County, and out there the County genuinely is the answer — the permit desk is the Hardin County Planning and Development Commission at 150 N Provident Way, Suite 225, on (270) 769-5479, and the county’s residential collection franchise, written for “the unincorporated areas of Hardin County, Kentucky” and “limited to residential solid waste only,” actually applies out here, which it does not inside any city. Rineyville is the sharpest illustration on this site. Four miles from a county seat that deliberately opted its own single-family houses into a building inspection program, to territory with no municipal government whatsoever. Same county, same limestone, two different answers to do I need a permit? And then Fort Knox, which is none of the above. It is a United States Army installation and also a Census-designated place, 109,000 acres across Bullitt, Hardin and Meade counties, and it is federal land: city and county rules do not apply on post, and the installation sets its own. We have no affiliation with it, no endorsement from it and no claim to operate on it, and anyone moving on or off post should take the installation’s own guidance before ours. One correction while we are here, because locals notice: the United States Bullion Depository is a Treasury facility guarded by the United States Mint Police, not an Army one. Give us the address and you will know which of the four applies before a truck is loaded.
Nobody is collecting this for you, and where the load actually goes
The case for a container here is not something we invented. It is a description of what the governments above you do and do not do. One: inside the Elizabethtown city limits the City does not collect household garbage at all. § 92.031(H)(1) lists the lawful methods and the first of them is “pickup and collection by sanitation companies, who possess a valid business license.” The same subchapter is unusually explicit that letting material pile up is itself the offense: § 92.031(F) makes it a violation to fail to dispose of garbage, debris and rubbish “at least one time per week,” § 92.031(A) allows 96 hours for anything “subject to decay” except in a tightly covered container, and § 92.030 makes a violation of the subchapter “a public nuisance.” The practical read is short: bag the kitchen waste for your weekly collection, and keep the container for the debris. Two: the City’s free programs are written to exclude precisely what a project makes. The 2026 Spring Clean-Up is published as “MARCH 30th THRU MAY 1st — JUNK AND DEBRIS,” with appliances on call-in from 27 April to 1 May, and its collection zones are drawn west and east of US 31-W and north and south of KY 1357 or KY 251. The refusal list is the City’s own sentence: “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,” “less than twelve (12) inches in diameter and/or five (5) feet in length,” on a four-week rotation, and it expressly does not cover debris from “the clearing of land.” Then the line that ends the argument for anyone doing this for a living: “Licensed contractors must remove and dispose of debris from their own work professionally.” Those dates are as the City published them for 2026 and they move every year — confirm current dates with Public Works, (270) 737-7890. Three: the county’s route for awkward material is a calendar rather than a place. Hardin County holds a household hazardous waste event once a year and an electronics event once a year, and its seven around-the-clock drop-offs — Eastview, Elizabethtown, the Farmers Market, Glendale, Radcliff, Sonora and Vine Grove — take rinsed #1 and #2 plastics, rinsed aluminum and tin, non-greasy cardboard and newspaper, with the county writing the limit down itself: “items not listed above are not accepted at any drop-off location.” Clear a house out in March and the hazardous waste day may be months away. Solid Waste is (270) 360-9207. Four, and it matters more here than in most markets: burning is not the fallback inside the city. § 92.031(I) makes burning garbage a nuisance anywhere in the city, and burning debris or rubbish a nuisance “except in an approved incinerator”; only wood, tree branches and yard trimmings may be burned, with Fire Chief approval, a permit if one is required, 50 feet from any structure, an adult watching it and an extinguishing agent to hand — and the Chief may prohibit all burning outright. Where a load goes is a class question in Kentucky: the Commonwealth permits contained, construction and demolition debris, inert, residual and special waste facilities separately, and charges a $1.75-per-ton environmental remediation fee under KRS 224.43-500 into the Kentucky Pride Fund, which pays to clear illegal open dumps. Hardin County runs its own permitted contained landfill on Audubon Trace as public infrastructure — that is the County’s facility, not ours, and questions about it belong to the County on (270) 360-9207. Everything we haul leaves for a permitted Kentucky disposal facility, with the metal and the cardboard pulled out first and the tarp on before the truck leaves your driveway.
Old housing, split tenure, and a calendar the Army sets
Two markets sit inside one service area, and the line between them is a city limit. Elizabethtown was 31,394 people at the 2020 census and an estimated 35,448 by mid-2025, a rise of about 12.9 percent in five years, across 27.18 square miles. Hardin County was 110,702 and is estimated at 113,482, with 51,149 housing units spread over 623.40 square miles and 12,344 veterans living in it — roughly one resident in nine, before anybody counts active duty. The number that shapes our week is tenure: owner-occupancy is 49.3 percent inside the city and 62.6 percent county-wide. The city is where the rental turnover, the landlord clear-outs and the move-out debris are; the county is where the owner-occupied renovation, the outbuilding demolition and the land clearing are. Two customers, two loads, two seasons. Age fills in the rest: about two in five Hardin County homes were built before 1980 on American Community Survey five-year estimates for 2019 to 2023, with the 1970s the biggest single decade at 16.2 percent and the 2000s the biggest overall at 18.2 percent. One distinction plenty of sites blur: the federal lead rule draws its line at 1978 and the census bucket is 1980, and those are not the same year — but a large share of that pre-1980 stock sits on the older side of the federal line, and certification for paid work disturbing paint in a pre-1978 house comes from EPA, because Kentucky never took that program over. The summer calendar is set partly by the Army. Fort Knox is a headquarters post, its people largely live off post, and the Army’s own published window is that “PCS season runs from June to August and potentially into September.” We publish no volume figure against that and never will — the point is only that a predictable share of this area moves house against a hard report date, in the same weeks, every year. The permit answer changes with the line too. Kentucky has one building code and the Commonwealth writes it: KRS 198B.050 requires a mandatory Uniform State Building Code for “all buildings” in the state, adopted as the 2018 Kentucky Building Code at 815 KAR 7:120 and the 2018 Kentucky Residential Code at 815 KAR 7:125, both effective 3 December 2024. But KRS 198B.060(8) provides that nothing requires a single-family dwelling to be permitted or inspected “unless a local government has established a building inspection program” — and Elizabethtown established one and wrote it to reach houses expressly, at § 150.01(C), “for application to all buildings, including single-family dwellings.” As published in the City’s code a residential demolition permit is $50 and a commercial one $100; fee schedules move, so confirm current figures with Planning and Development on (270) 765-6121. Note also § 154.011: construction and demolition permits are required, and a permit goes void if work is “suspended or abandoned for a period of six months.” Whether the same is true a few miles out is a question for the county rather than an assumption. One more piece of local economy, stated carefully. Glendale is the site of what was announced as the largest economic development investment in Kentucky’s history — a $5.8 billion battery campus on 1,500 acres, ten miles south of Elizabethtown. The EV battery joint venture ended in December 2025 and around 1,600 people lost their jobs; Ford has since committed a further $2 billion to retool the plant for grid-scale energy storage, with production planned to restart in late 2027. Whatever the eventual outcome, Hardin County has spent five years absorbing the construction, the housing demand and now the disruption of a project on that scale. And a framing note, since this area sits between two metropolitan areas: Elizabethtown and Fort Knox are the principal cities of their own metropolitan area. This is the middle of its own map, not the edge of somebody else’s.
One forecast office, seven counties, and the same limestone underneath
Weather is the one layer that does not change at a city line. Every county on this list — Hardin, LaRue, Meade, Nelson, Grayson, Bullitt and Hart — sits inside the warning area of the National Weather Service forecast office at Louisville, which covers 49 Kentucky counties and ten in southern Indiana. That is the office to watch, and it is worth saying plainly because the wrong one gets cited constantly: this area is not in the Paducah office’s territory. What the record shows is a market with roughly fifty inches of rain a year and no dry season: May is the wettest month at about 5.82 inches and it is also when renovation season starts, while September is the driest at about 3.14 inches and still mild, which makes it the best window in the year for outdoor demolition and land clearing. Winter here is not a snow problem — about five inches in an average year against fifty of rain, with December to February lows around 23 to 27 degrees. The risk that stops work is ice. The January 2009 ice storm is the benchmark people still measure against, and we write it as what it is: a regional event verified across central Kentucky rather than one documented for Hardin County by name. Severe weather has two anchors on this list and both belong to a specific place. The Super Outbreak of 3 April 1974 produced an F5 that killed 31 people, 28 of them in Brandenburg, in Meade County — a town on this page. And the most recent confirmed tornado near our yard is an EF-1 at Rineyville on 31 October 2018, four straight-line miles from where our trucks park. Facts like those stay attached to the county they happened in; we do not lend them to neighbors, and there is one later outbreak we deliberately do not claim for Hardin County at all, because the sources do not agree that it touched us. Underneath all seven counties is the same rock. The Kentucky Geological Survey names Elizabethtown, Fort Knox and Munfordville among the karst cities of the Western Pennyroyal — three of the places on this page — and describes karst terrain as moving water through underground channels so quickly that it is “sensitive to groundwater pollution,” with pollutants entering a karst aquifer “not filtered.” That is the real reason liquids never go into one of our containers here. What we will not do is overclaim it: no agency says heavy trucks cause sinkholes, and KGS attributes collapse to water and soil piping; KGS says its own sinkhole mapping is “not recommended for predicting future subsidence,” so nobody should read a map and decide a property is safe or unsafe; there is no honest karst percentage or sinkhole count to publish for this county; and we are not geologists. What we do is set the box on the firmest, best-drained surface available and keep every liquid out of it. Two last practical items. If your own work involves digging — footings, posts, a stump, a lateral — Kentucky 811 comes first: dial 811 or use kentucky811.org, give two full working days notice, and note that a ticket runs 21 calendar days and the tolerance zone is 18 inches either side of a mark, where you hand-dig. That is KRS 367.4901 to 367.4917. We could not verify a toll-free number for the center, so we publish none, and Kentucky’s requirement to mark out your dig area is written as a conditional one rather than a universal rule — do it anyway, it makes the locate better. And on radon we take EPA’s own position rather than a zone number: “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.” A basement or crawlspace opened up for a remodel is a sensible week to do it.
Service Area FAQs
Do you charge extra to deliver outside Elizabethtown?
No. Everything listed on this page is inside the standard area, and the rate is the one we would quote for the same job in Elizabethtown. The drop, the pull, the days you keep it and the disposal up to the agreed tonnage all sit inside the single figure you get on the phone. What crossing a boundary changes is never the price. It is the rulebook, and which desk answers.
How far do you actually go?
Across Hardin County and a good way into the counties around it. The short runs from the yard are the Dixie corridor north toward Radcliff and Vine Grove, the county roads west out to Rineyville and Cecilia, and the I-65 and US 31W corridor south to Glendale, Sonora and on down toward Upton. Further out we run east into Nelson County for Bardstown, north-east into Bullitt for Shepherdsville, north-west into Meade for Brandenburg, south-east into LaRue for Hodgenville, west into Grayson for Leitchfield and south into Hart for Munfordville. Every distance we publish is straight-line, and we do not publish drive times at all — between the Fort Knox reservation, the Ohio River and the hills west of the corridor, a real route is often a good deal longer than a ruler suggests, and an invented drive time helps nobody. The regional layers travel further than the local ones, which is worth knowing: the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet runs this area from District 4, and most of the service area sits inside the Lincoln Trail Area Development District. Bullitt County is the exception on both counts, and we did not establish which highway district does cover it, so we will not name one on a guess. For multi-container work and trade accounts we go further still. Address not on the list? Ring and ask — and in the rare case we cannot reach you, we usually know who does.
Can you deliver out to Rineyville, Cecilia, Glendale, Stephensburg and White Mills?
Yes, and those five are the tier where the answer is cleanest, because there is no city hall out there to complicate it. The permit desk is the Hardin County Planning and Development Commission on (270) 769-5479, nuisance and property complaints go to County Code Enforcement at (270) 360-9207, and the county’s residential collection franchise — the one written for “the unincorporated areas of Hardin County” and “limited to residential solid waste only” — genuinely applies out here, which it does not inside a city. What constrains us on a county lot is the approach rather than the street: long gravel or bare dirt drives, gates too narrow for the truck to swing through, soft shoulders, and ground that will hold a loaded box in a dry September and will not hold one in a wet March. On a property with its own well and septic, mark the tank lid, the drain field and the well head so nothing is set over any of them, and if your own work involves digging, ring Kentucky 811 two full working days ahead. And Rineyville is four straight-line miles from our yard — four miles from a county seat that put its own single-family houses inside a building inspection program, to ground with no municipal government at all. That short run is the whole argument of this site.
Which parts of Elizabethtown do you cover?
All of it, and the layout makes it straightforward: the Dixie corridor runs north and south through the middle as US 31W, Ring Road loops the newer commercial ground on the east side, and the older grid sits around the Public Square and West Dixie Avenue. From the yard on North Dixie Highway everything inside the city is a short run. Placement is the part worth a sentence on the phone. A narrow lot on an older street, with a short drive and cars parked both sides, is a different job from a wide apron on newer ground out by Ring Road. A shared driveway in a townhome row settles the size by itself. And where the only level spot is unpaved, we need to talk about how soft it gets before anybody promises anything. One thing to check before you assume which government you are dealing with: an Elizabethtown mailing address does not prove an Elizabethtown address. Keep going north up our own road in the same ZIP code and the addresses start coming back as Radcliff, with ground between the two that is in no incorporated place at all. The City publishes an “Am I in the City Limits?” map for exactly that reason. If any part of the box has to stand in a city street or on a sidewalk we will say so before we book it, and the calls are the City on (270) 765-6121 and Public Works on (270) 737-7890; if the frontage is a numbered state route it is KYTC District 4 on (270) 766-5146 instead. Every box goes down with plywood under the wheels and both rails, and where one is standing tight against a commercial building, Fire Prevention on (270) 765-2121 are the people who will look at it.
Talk to a real person
Need a dumpster in Elizabethtown today?
Give us the street address rather than the mailing town, say what is going in, and you will have the size, one flat figure and a day before you hang up. Nothing on this site to fill in, and nothing waiting in an inbox overnight.
Elizabethtown, the rest of Hardin County, and seventeen more places across seven counties · Mon–Fri 6:30am–5pm, Sat 7am–1pm