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.
- Go to the City of Winston-Salem’s “Recycle Today” web tool by clicking here.
- Type your home address into the search tool which should provide an autocomplete result you can click to complete.
- You’ll now see the next collection(s) event coming up along with an embedded calendar.
- To add your address’s specific collections calendar, click the “Get Calendar” button above the embedded calendar widget.
- 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.
- For Google Calendar users, after clicking “Add to Google Calendar” you’ll find a .ics link that you will need to copy.
- Next, open Google Calendar and press the “+” button next to the Other Calendars section.
- Click the “Add URL” option.
- Now paste the link you copied in Step #6 and click “Add Calendar”.
- 🎉 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).
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
- City of Winston-Salem’s Address Lookup tool ↗️
- Holiday Schedule ↗️
- Recycling General Information and City Red/Blue Map ↗️
- Recycling Schedules for 2022 (.pdf)
- Yard-Waste Cart Information ↗️
- 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
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.