Locally Owned Dumpster Rental in Columbia Since 2014

Dale Carver grew up here, in a 1970s house off Garners Ferry Road his grandparents bought when that was still the edge of town, and went to work for a Columbia remodelling crew out of high school. He spent most of his twenties under houses, pulling wet insulation and rotted joists out of crawlspaces, tearing three-layer roofs off in July and hauling twenty-year-old decks out of back yards from Irmo down to Gaston, watching the same problems repeat themselves. The container never came when it was supposed to. When it did, the invoice had grown. Nobody ever warns a homeowner that a saturated crawlspace weighs a fortune — wet batt insulation, old vapour barrier and rotted framing fill a can with weight rather than volume — or that a plaster-and-lath house runs two to three times a drywall one, so the can that sounded generous on the phone is at legal weight while it still looks half full, and then it sits in the driveway too heavy to move.

In 2014 he bought a used roll-off truck and four cans, parked them on 1725 Broad River Rd just off I-20, and started answering the phone himself. His sons came into the business as they got old enough, and between them they run the yard and the dispatch board now. The first job was a tear-off off Clemson Road for a homeowner whose previous hauler had cancelled twice while the crew stood on the roof waiting. She still calls us, and she still tells the story.

Word moved the way it does here — through contractors, through neighbours, through the guy at the supply counter who mentions that the dumpster people actually showed up. Then two things settled it: hail, when every roofer in the county needs cans in the same fortnight, and the university turnover, when May move-out and August move-in empty and refill whole streets of rentals around Five Points, Olympia, Rosewood and the Vista inside a fortnight. We added trucks as the calls came in rather than borrowing against volume we did not have yet. 12 years on we run a small fleet, we still dispatch out of Columbia, and the phone still rings at a desk with somebody local behind it.

Why we care about getting the quote right

The dumpster industry has a reputation problem and it is largely self-inflicted. Low teaser rates, a tonnage allowance buried in the fine print, then a bill with an overage charge nobody explained. We priced against that from day one. When you call, we ask what you are throwing away, what it weighs, how long you need it and where it is going. Then we give you a number that includes delivery, pickup, the rental window and disposal. If we think you are about to order the wrong size, we say so — even when the wrong size is the more expensive one.

What being local actually buys you

It is not a slogan. It means our dispatcher knows which blocks in Shandon, Rosewood and Olympia have drives too narrow to take a 30 and water oak limbs too low for the arm, which houses near campus have no driveway at all, which Eastover and Swansea lots are still served off the back alley, which gravel drives out toward Blythewood and Elgin a loaded truck should not commit to for a couple of days after a hard rain, which acreage needs the septic tank, drain field and well head flagged before we pull in, which subdivisions hold you to driveway-only placement and a container day limit, and roughly what a 1,900 square foot bungalow with plaster walls and a wet crawlspace produces when it finally gets cleared out. It means that when hail comes across Richland and Lexington counties and half the region wants a container in the same week, our trucks are already here.

We have seen the mistakes so you do not have to

The four that cost people the most money, in order: forgetting how much comes out of the crawlspace, because a strip-out ahead of encapsulation is a load of its own in wet insulation, old vapour barrier, crushed flex duct and rotted framing; ordering by volume when the debris is dense — plaster and lath, heart pine, broken concrete, block and brick pier work are the usual culprits; forgetting that roofing is sized by squares and layers rather than roof area, so a second and third layer doubles or triples the load off an older house; and heaping a load proud of the rails so it cannot be tarped before a spring thunderstorm adds a ton of water weight to it. Every one of those is avoidable with one honest conversation before delivery.

We have cleared whole streets of hail-damaged roofs in a single week, multi-layer tear-offs off the older stock in town and off the big houses in the newer subdivisions, full gut jobs in Shandon, Elmwood Park and Cottontown where plaster and lath comes off the walls at two to three times the weight of drywall, crawlspace after crawlspace stripped back to bare joists and encapsulated after years of standing water, termite repairs that started as a bathroom remodel and finished at the band joist and the sill plate, flood and storm work along Gills Creek, Forest Acres and Rosewood, deck tear-offs where the posts came up with their footings still attached, new construction and builder punch-out cans out through Blythewood, Chapin and Lexington, student rental turnovers around Five Points and Olympia inside the May and August fortnights, restaurant and retail fit-outs along Bush River Road, Harbison Boulevard and Devine Street, shops, equipment sheds and pole barns emptied out in the county between Hopkins, Eastover and Swansea, concrete drives and aprons broken out and replaced, pine, water oak and sweetgum limb wood run as clean separate loads after spring storms, and attics, garages, carports and back-lot sheds packed with two decades of bikes, tools and holiday boxes. Every one of those loads behaves differently at the scale house, and knowing that in advance is most of the job.

Credentials and cover

• Licensed to haul solid waste in South Carolina
• Full commercial general liability and auto cover — certificates available on request for GCs and property managers
• Workers’ compensation cover for every driver on the road
• Material taken only to permitted, licensed transfer and disposal facilities
• Compliance with South Carolina disposal rules under SC DES, and clean brush kept as a separate load on every job

Contractors and property managers: ask for our COI when you set up an account. We can usually have it emailed the same day.