Helpful Waste Tips From Your Local Team

Hosting season in Southern New Hampshire arrives fast. Between piling Thanksgiving dinner prep onto your weekly grocery run, welcoming visiting family, and processing the inevitable mountain of Black Friday and Cyber Monday delivery boxes, November is the single biggest "extra waste" month of the year.

At MD’s Recycling & Waste, our goal is simple: ensure you never have to guess when your barrel goes out or what belongs inside it. Here is your complete guide to navigating holiday routes, extra packaging, and late-fall cleanup projects this November.

Holiday Route Schedules: Thanksgiving & Veterans Day

When holiday schedules shift, reliability means letting you know before you have to ask. Here is how collection runs across our service areas this month:

Veterans Day (Wednesday, November 11)

• Status: Normal Schedule.
• There are no changes to route schedules for Veterans Day. Please put your barrels out on your standard pickup day and time.

Thanksgiving Week (Monday, Nov 23 – Saturday, Nov 28)

Thanksgiving Day is our major fall route adjustment so our drivers can enjoy the holiday with their families.

• Monday, Nov 23 & Tuesday, Nov 24: Normal collection days.
• Wednesday, Nov 25: Normal collection day.
• Thursday, Nov 26 (Thanksgiving Day): NO PICKUP. Thursday routes will be collected on Saturday, November 28.
• Friday, Nov 27: Normal collection day.

Tip for winter reliability: As temperatures drop and early snow falls, please keep barrels clear of snowbanks and placed on a flat, plowed surface so our automated arms and drivers can easily reach them.

Managing the Post-Black Friday Cardboard Wave

Between online shopping deals and holiday hosting, delivery boxes stack up faster in late November than at any other point in the year. Single-stream recycling makes disposal easy, but a few quick steps keep your barrel from overflowing:

1. Flatten Every Single Box

It sounds simple, but unflattened cardboard is the number one cause of prematurely full recycling barrels. Breaking down your boxes flattens the volume by up to 70%, giving you room for the entire week's packaging. At the recycling facility (EL Harvey / Waste Connections and NRRA), flattened cardboard processes through sorting belts cleanly without jamming machinery.

2. Know What Stays OUT of the Recycling Barrel

While single-stream means paper, clean cardboard, metal cans, and plastic bottles mix together in one barrel, holiday packaging introduces a few items that cause major processing headaches:

• Plastic Film & Bubble Wrap: Plastic shipping envelopes, air pillows, and stretch wrap belong in household trash or grocery store drop-off bins. In recycling sorters, film wraps around rotating axles and brings operations to a halt.
• Styrofoam & Foam Blocks: Molded foam packaging cannot be recycled single-stream regardless of the resin code stamped on it. Place it in your regular waste barrel.
• Foil Wrapping Paper, Bows, & Ribbons: Sticky tape, metallic foil, and fabric ribbons contaminate paper streams. Stick to traditional paper wrapping or throw ribbons into regular waste.
• Greasy Pizza & Turkey Boxes: Cardboard soaked in cooking grease or food waste cannot be recycled. Cut off clean tops for recycling and throw greasy bottoms in the trash.

Roll-Off Last Call: The Driveway Window Before the Freeze

If you’ve been holding onto garage clutter, basement storage boxes, or leftover materials from a fall home improvement project, November is your last comfortable window to order a driveway roll-off dumpster.

Once New Hampshire ground freezes solid and town snowplows take to the roads, placing roll-offs in driveways gets significantly more complex:

• Cold ground increases the risk of ice lock on driveway surfaces.
• Snow accumulation restricts clear placement boundaries and truck maneuvering.
• Municipal winter parking bans require clear access ways.

Our 2 to 6-yard driveway roll-offs feature compact footprints engineered specifically to fit standard residential driveways without damaging pavement. With flat-rate pricing and zero hidden environmental add-ons, you get a straightforward cleanup before winter officially locks in.

Rooted in the Community Since 1988

Thanksgiving is a natural moment for us to look back at the towns where our trucks run every week—Milford, Amherst, Bedford, Mount Vernon, New Boston, Brookline, Hollis, New Ipswich, Nashua, and Merrimack.

We don't just haul here; we live here. Over the past few months alone, that connection has looked like donating dumpsters for the Amherst MCAA field cleanup, sponsoring placemats for the local Boy Scouts spaghetti dinner, and supporting local town events.

To every family that rolls an MD’s barrel to the curb each week: thank you for trusting us with your home services since 1988.

Have questions about your holiday route or need a driveway roll-off before the freeze? Call our local team at (603) 672-4803 or request a quote online today.