Following thousands of complaints, Lexington dropped curbside trash provider
After receiving nearly 3,000 complaints over the past year from residents about trash pickup by private companies, Lexington County ditched one of its providers for a new one.
The thousands of complaints, lodged by residents from across the county, were obtained by The State through a Freedom of Information Act request. Between July 2024 and October 2025, the county received 2,993 complaints related to things like missed garbage collections, difficulty contacting the waste management companies and the cost of the service. The issues were part of the county’s reason for dropping GFL Environmental when its contract expired, a county spokesperson confirmed.
“Why do I have to pay for trash service when you can’t even do your job to pick it up on the assigned day??,” one complaint read. “This is a weekly occurrence of it not getting [picked] up. You would fire me as a customer if I paid my bill like y’all pick up my trash.”
“Once again I’m stuck rolling a full can back to the house and dealing with another week of taking trash directly to the collection station. I’ve filed multiple complaints and nothing happens,” another wrote.
The majority of the complaints, submitted by residents through an online portal, were submitted about GFL, with more than 2,300 submissions from residents who listed GFL as their service provider. More than 2,700 of the complaints, including for the other trash companies, were related to missed trash pickups. A spokesperson for the company could not be reached for comment.
Aside from trash pickup that some municipalities within the county offer, residents in unincorporated areas are largely left to fend for themselves since the county doesn’t mandate trash pickup for all homes. Lexington has split the unincorporated areas of the county into trash districts, which are then serviced by private companies. Residents aren’t required to use the companies and the ones who do pay either a monthly or quarterly fee for the service.
“It’s just really been a tough subject to have to try to find some balance in continuity for the entire county,” Lexington County Council Chairman Todd Cullum told The State, adding that the mix of both rural and urban areas in the county has made finding that balance difficult.
Only around a third of homeowners in the county use the curbside service, Lee McIntyre, the county’s director of solid waste management, told county council last November, while the free collection sites across Lexington have become overburdened and struggled to keep up. Since so few people use the pickup services, the companies that provide them are often driving to rural areas only to pick up a handful of garbage carts, McIntyre said.
As Lexington has grown, adding some 100,000 people to its overall population over the last two decades, its trash output has slowly crept upwards, putting pressure on the county’s trash collection sites and on the companies that provide services.
