Trash Calendars

Winston-Salem Trash Schedule

Winston-Salem trash cart with ice cycles hanging from the lid.

Hello, Winston-Salemites! Below you’ll find a quick how-to for adding the Winston-Salem garbage, recycling, and yard-waste pickup schedules to your calendar.

☹️ Bad News
Each of the pickup services can fall on different days depending on your neighborhood. This would be really time-consuming for me to build custom calendars for..

🙂 Good News
Hidden surreptitiously on the City of Winston-Salem website is the city’s own calendar tool that will provide a link to add trash, recycling, and yard-waste events to your calendar of choice.

How to add to your calendar

This will provide calendar notifications for the following three collection services for Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Garbage, Recycling, & Yard-waste.

  1. Go to the City of Winston-Salem’s “Recycle Today” web tool by clicking here.
    Screenshot of Google Chrome URL bar with the cityofws.org/611/recycle-today address entered
  2. Type your home address into the search tool which should provide an autocomplete result you can click to complete.
    Screenshot of the Reycle-Tool showing a half-way entered address that provides an autocomplete option.
  3. You’ll now see the next collection(s) event coming up along with an embedded calendar.
    Screenshot showing results of an address entered and the Next Event happening on August 30th for Garbage and Recycling pickup
  4. To add your address’s specific collections calendar, click the “Get Calendar” button above the embedded calendar widget.
    Screenshot showing a red circle around the Get a Calendar call-to-action.
  5. For iCal and Outlook, most people on recent devices will be able to select the respective options and hit the subscribe button to subscribe to these on their calendars of choice automatically.
    Screenshot showing the add to calendar options for Google Calendar, iCal (Apple), and Microsoft Outlook
  6. For Google Calendar users, after clicking “Add to Google Calendar” you’ll find a .ics link that you will need to copy.
    Screenshot of Google Calendar option that provides a long link

  7. Next, open Google Calendar and press the “+” button next to the Other Calendars section.
    Screenshot of red arrow pointing to the Add option on the Google Calendars main page
  8. Click the “Add URL” option.
    Screenshot showing the "From URL" option highlighted in the Other Calendar add option in Google Calendars
  9. Now paste the link you copied in Step #6 and click “Add Calendar”.
    Screenshot showing a link pasted in the Google Calendar add from URL option field
  10. 🎉 Go back to the Calendar view and you’ll now see events for trash, recycling, and yard-waste pickup. These dates include any scheduling impacts due to observed city holidays (see the Thanksgiving week example in the screenshot below).
    Screenshot showing a Google Calendar in month view for November 2022 with collections events marked in orange and US holidays in green.

Winston-Salem Collections Details

  • Garbage is collected weekly. Collection days are Monday through Friday depending on your address.
  • Recycling is collected every two weeks and neighborhoods are designed for a “red” or “blue” week pickup
    • No sorting is needed for rollout recycling pickup
  • Yard-waste is collected weekly but requires the purchase of both a 96-gallon roll-out cart ($65) and an annual sticker ($65).

Helpful Links

  1. City of Winston-Salem’s Address Lookup tool ↗️
  2. Holiday Schedule ↗️
  3. Recycling General Information and City Red/Blue Map ↗️
  4. Recycling Schedules for 2022 (.pdf)
  5. Yard-Waste Cart Information ↗️
  6. There are separate tools provided for leaf, brush, and bulky item collection day lookup. This set of tools is much more archaic and does not provide a calendar integration — however, it technically works.

Winston-Salem Collects App

Winston-Salem Collects app logo. Silhouette of white trash cart on green background with WS logo in the middle.

Recently, the City of Winston-Salem launched the Winston-Salem Collects app on Android and iOS that provides quicker mobile access to the lookup tools linked above.

Download on the App Store
Get it on Google Play