Boston trash & recycling 311 requests
How many 311 requests in the trash & recycling category residents of Boston have filed since January 2021.
Current release
Data through April 11, 2026
Data from January 2021 through April 11, 2026
Total Requests
245.2K
in the trash & recycling category
Latest Month
1.4K
April 2026
Share of total
16.8%
of all Boston 311 requests
Median Resolution
14.0h
half of requests close faster
Monthly trash & recycling requests
How many trash & recycling 311 requests Boston residents file each month.
How this category is extracted
What counts as trash & recycling: Missed garbage pickups, recycling and composting issues, bulk-item collection, cart maintenance, and household hazardous waste.
In Boston’s raw 311 feed, the following 7 service_type values roll into trash & recycling:
- Improper Storage of Trash (Barrels)
- Missed Trash/Recycling/Yard Waste/Bulk Item
- Recycling Cart Return
- Request for Recycling Cart
- Schedule a Bulk Item Pickup
- Schedule a Bulk Item Pickup SS
- Sticker Request
To reproduce these counts against the raw feed
SELECT count(*)
FROM <boston_311_raw>
WHERE service_type IN (
'Improper Storage of Trash (Barrels)',
'Missed Trash/Recycling/Yard Waste/Bulk Item',
'Recycling Cart Return',
'Request for Recycling Cart',
'Schedule a Bulk Item Pickup',
'Schedule a Bulk Item Pickup SS',
'Sticker Request'
)Analyst tip: Austin prefixes everything 'ARR -' (Austin Resource Recovery): 'ARR - Garbage', 'ARR - Recycling', 'ARR - Compost', 'ARR - Bulk', 'ARR - Household Hazardous Waste'. Calgary uses a mix of 'WRS -' (Waste and Recycling Services) and 'GFL -' (the contractor Green For Life). NYC doesn't break sanitation out into its own category in our mapping — expect NYC sanitation requests to appear under 'other' or 'street_cleaning'.
See how trash & recycling is defined for every tracked city →
Source & provenance
Counts on this page are derived from Boston’s official open 311 data feed, covering January 2021 through April 11, 2026. Category assignment uses a hand-curated mapping from the city’s raw service types to a normalized cross-city category. View the underlying dataset at data.boston.gov.