Chicago trash & recycling 311 requests
How many 311 requests in the trash & recycling category residents of Chicago have filed since January 2021.
Current release
Data through March 2026
Data from January 2021 through March 2026
Total Requests
346.1K
in the trash & recycling category
Latest Month
6.2K
March 2026
Share of total
3.7%
of all Chicago 311 requests
Median Resolution
23.9d
half of requests close faster
Monthly trash & recycling requests
How many trash & recycling 311 requests Chicago 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 Chicago’s raw 311 feed, the following 2 service_type values roll into trash & recycling:
- Blue Recycling Cart
- Garbage Cart Maintenance
To reproduce these counts against the raw feed
SELECT count(*)
FROM <chicago_311_raw>
WHERE service_type IN (
'Blue Recycling Cart',
'Garbage Cart Maintenance'
)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 Chicago’s official open 311 data feed, covering January 2021 through March 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.cityofchicago.org.