About this site

Why it exists

Nearly every dumpster size guide on the internet is a chart. Four boxes, their dimensions, a sentence about what each one suits. That chart is fine as far as it goes, and it stops exactly where the money starts.

Your rental includes a weight allowance. Go past it and the overage is billed back to you by the ton, at a rate set by whatever the local landfill charges. Nobody puts that on the chart, because the honest version of it is uncomfortable: a full mid-size box of ordinary household clear-out — the lightest thing you can put in a dumpster — is already brushing a typical allowance.

And for heavy debris the advice everyone gives is not just incomplete, it is wrong. "Rent the next size up" does nothing for concrete or shingles, because the limit is not the box. It is the truck, and the same truck sits under every size.

Where the numbers come from

Debris weights are taken from hauler-published tables and trade figures, and every one of them ships as a range rather than a single number, because the underlying data is a range — packing, moisture and mix all move it. A midpoint would be false precision on a figure you get billed against, and it would hide the spread that tells you how much slack to leave.

Where we do not have a sourced figure, the tool says so instead of guessing. An unknown weight is never quietly treated as a light one.

The source we threw out

The obvious authority here is the EPA's published volume-to-weight conversion factors. We read them, and then we refused to use them.

Their figure for concrete is around 860 pounds per cubic yard. That is impossible for our question — broken concrete rubble in a container runs several times that. The factors trace back to a study converting observed facility volumes into tonnage for recycling-rate reporting: a different material stream, measured for a different purpose, and correct for that purpose. Used here they would understate the weight, which is precisely the direction that produces a surprise bill.

A number can be authoritative, correctly cited, and still describe the wrong object. That one is banned in our source code by name, with a note explaining why, so nobody helpfully puts it back.

What this site will not do

It will not tell you whether your deck or driveway can take the weight. A wrong answer there is not a billing problem, and at that point "check with a structural engineer" is not a disclaimer attached to the answer — it is the whole honest answer.

It also will not pretend to know your hauler. Weight allowances disagree by two to three times between companies, banned-material lists are set locally, and the tool cannot know which yard is coming to your street. Where the honest answer is "confirm this before you book," that is what it says.

Who makes it

FourFold Labs LLC, a small software company. Our other tools are howmanyboxes.com and whatsizestorage.com, which answer the moving-box and storage-unit questions.

How this is paid for

When the tool works out that a dumpster bag suits your load better than a rented container, the link to buy that bag earns us a commission. That is currently the only way this site makes money, and it creates an obvious pull — so the tool also tells you when a rented box would hold the same load, on the same screen, and says which is the better deal. The answer comes from your numbers, not from what we are paid for.

Get in touch

If a figure here looks wrong, tell us and say why — ideally with what you were quoted and by whom. That is the most useful mail we get. support@fourfoldlabs.com.