Garden & Vegetation Waste Removal in Sydney
A green bin holds one hedge trim, not a whole weekend of gardening. Every council in Sydney runs a green-lid bin, and every one of them sets limits on branch thickness, bundle length and total weight that a real garden day will blow straight past.
What we remove
Hedge and shrub prunings, lawn clippings, leaf litter, palm fronds, branches and loppings, and the pile left behind after a landscaper, arborist or storm.
What your green bin will actually accept
The limits are stricter than most people realise, and they differ by council:
- Northern Beaches — branches under 75mm diameter. Anything larger has to go to Kimbriki Resource Recovery Centre yourself; there is no booked green waste collection.
- Mosman — limbs under 1m long and under 100mm diameter, tied with natural string, 20kg per bundle. No plastic bags, no hessian bags, no cardboard boxes.
- Ku-ring-gai — weeds to 50mm diameter and 400mm long, bin under 100kg, no soil, no logs, no stumps.
- Woollahra — branches to 15cm diameter, no more than 11 bundles per bulk pickup.
- Willoughby — bundled and tied, maximum 1m, branches under 75mm, no painted or treated timber, no timber with nails, no whole fences or pallets.
- City of Sydney — bundled branches to 1m and 10cm diameter; anything thicker is refused.
Tree stumps are excluded everywhere. So is soil, and so is anything chemically treated.
Two councils that catch people out
Lane Cove has no green bin at all. The bins are general waste weekly, yellow containers fortnightly, blue paper fortnightly, and a maroon food-waste bin for houses. Garden waste has nowhere to go in the standard service.
North Sydney doesn’t provide the bin. Residents buy their own 240L green waste bin, and collection is a booked service every second Monday — the same fortnightly cycle as bulky waste, with a 4pm Sunday cut-off.
If your council does have a bulk green service
Use it when you can. Woollahra gives three complimentary bulk garden pickups a year on top of the bin. Ku-ring-gai runs one too, though it draws from the same pool of four annual bookings as your general clean-up — so a bulk green pickup costs you a hard-waste collection. Mosman runs a pre-paid excess green service capped at 5m³ and twelve services a year, with an extra charge above 3m³.
Northern Beaches and Hornsby have no booked green service at all. If you’re there and the pile is bigger than the bin, the options are a trip to a resource recovery centre or a call to someone with a truck.
Why green waste can’t just sit
Wet vegetation composts where it lies. Within a few days a pile on a lawn kills the grass under it, and within a week it starts attracting insects and vermin. Grass clippings in particular go anaerobic fast and smell strongly by day three.
We also clean the green bin
Green bins get the worst residue of the three, because vegetation breaks down wet and sticks to the base. Emptying the bin doesn’t remove that — only a high-pressure clean does. If your green bin has been holding lawn clippings through a Sydney summer, it’s worth doing at the same time as the removal. See wheelie bin cleaning.
One thing to check before you fill the green bin
Whether your council accepts food scraps in it. In most of our service area it does not, and food in a garden-organics bin counts as contamination — the Northern Beaches warns that a contaminated load can be sent to landfill in its entirety. See our food and wet waste page for which councils have made the switch.
Doing the garden work too?
Our sister service myMowing handles the mowing and hedging, so the cutting and the carting can happen on the same visit.
Related services
Household rubbish removal · Food and wet waste removal
Get a quote
Call 1300 692 467. Servicing Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Lower North Shore and Eastern Suburbs.