Clean Your House of Hazardous Waste This Weekend
MMSD holding household hazardous waste collection Saturday, June 22.
Clean Your House of Hazardous Waste This Weekend
Although we are quickly approaching the longest day of the summer, the prolonged cold and gloomy city weather has us still ready to spring clean. And now is the perfect time to finally get to organizing the garage. Latex paint, car wax, fluorescent light bulbs and other hazardous materials can lay dormant in storage for years or become unusable. If you are looking to get rid of these items, keep them out of the environment and instead, simply load them into your car.
The motto of this program? If it doesn’t bring joy, just drop it off. On Saturday, June 22, Milwaukee county residents can visit Nicolet High School to do just that. From 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., residents can help keep our waterways safe by dropping off their unneeded and unwanted household hazardous waste products.
Common household items that can be brought to the collection:
- Garage and Workshop: antifreeze, gasoline, lighter fluid, paint thinner, road flares, shellac and more
- Home and Garden: fertilizer with pesticides, furniture polish, insect spray, mothballs, rat poison and more
- Kitchen and Bathroom: cleaners, disinfectants, hair remover, nail polish, and more
And, dropping off these materials couldn’t be any easier. Milwaukee Country residents can read through this list of accepted materials, gather their unneeded hazardous materials from their home, load up their vehicle, and pull up to Nicolet High School’s front parking lot. Veolia Environmental Services will do the rest.
Since 1997, the program has collected and properly disposed 21.2 million pounds of hazardous waste in Milwaukee County.
“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to get these chemicals out of their homes and help keep them from getting into Lake Michigan and the environment,” says MMSD’s Public Information Manager Bill Graffin.
Nicolette High School will be marked with signs and arrows to the drop-off site. They’ll even unload your car for you.
It’s free to visit Home HazMat Collections. You do have to live in Milwaukee County and will be asked for a driver’s license. The program can only accept waste that comes from a household. No businesses.
MMSD also offers three year-round drop-off locations in Franklin, Milwaukee, and Menomonee Falls, making properly disposing hazardous materials easy and accessible to all Milwaukee County residents.
Roughly, one third of collected material gets recycled, including oils and cooking oils. MMSD also offers a small, free store at the Franklin and Menomonee Falls locations where Milwaukee County residents can pick up paint and other products that are still in great condition for free.
In 2018, 18,4084 people used the Home HazMat Program, the highest number of participants ever. With your help, they have a chance to surpass that number this year, keeping Milwaukee County and our waterways clean.
Get the yuck out of your house. Get rid of household chemicals this Saturday, June 22nd from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Nicolet High School, 6701 N. Jean Nicolet Rd. All participants must have a valid driver’s license. For more information, including what to bring, addresses of permanent drop-off locations and more, visit their website.
