Safely dumping your hazardous waste in Gilbert - Arizona's Family

Safely dumping your hazardous waste in Gilbert

GILBERT, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) — Some items shouldn’t go in the trash, like batteries, paint, cooking oil, or pool chemicals. So how do you get rid of them?

There’s a Household Hazardous Waste Disposal facility for Gilbert residents that is celebrating that it saved more than 560,000 pounds of waste from going into Arizona landfills in 2022. Dropping off your waste is free. Carmelita Nichols, the environmental compliance coordinator at the facility, said, “One person dropped this off...here we have paint which will go into the swap shop. We have batteries, and these are used for tools. We also have electronic waste that we recycle here.”

Gilbert residents can drop off these items for processing and proper disposal, so they don’t contaminate water, start fires in trash trucks or end up in landfills. “Everything that goes back into the groundwater comes from our landfill and stormwater system, so we want to make sure that we do the best we can to keep this out of the ecosystem,” Nichols said.

Substances are also kept track of by weight. Lots of charitable organizations will recycle paint for their ongoing projects out of the facility as well.

Copyright 2023 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.