Junk Removal in Westfield, MA

Westfield is the third largest municipality in Hampden County with 40,834 people, and it has a much bigger land area than the valley cities, which changes the work. Fewer three story walk ups, more garages, sheds, barns and long driveways.

What the Whip City left behind

Westfield was once the world center of the buggy whip industry, which is where the nickname comes from. When that trade ended the town moved into bicycles, paper products, textile machinery and wood products, and much of that manufacturing has since gone too.

The practical legacy is a stock of older industrial and commercial buildings and the housing that was built around them. Those buildings generate commercial clearances and, when one is converted, construction and demolition debris that is priced by weight rather than truck volume.

The suburban half is the volume

Most residential work in Westfield looks nothing like a Holyoke walk up. It is a two car garage that has not held a car in nine years, a basement with thirty years of storage, a shed that has gone soft at the base, an above ground pool nobody swims in, and a playset the children outgrew.

All of those are easier jobs than their equivalents in the valley cities, because the truck can usually get within a few feet of the door and the floor is flat. A garage clearance here is a half to a full truck and most of a morning, and the sorting takes longer than the loading.

Westfield State makes late May busy

Westfield State University is residential, so the town has the same twice yearly turnover as the college towns further north, just at a smaller scale. Late May the off campus rentals empty and late August they fill again.

For a landlord that means the same advice that applies everywhere in this valley: book the slot weeks ahead rather than during the week itself, because every hauler in the region is committed at the same time.

What a Westfield garage usually holds

A wide mix, and about a third of it cannot go in a truck. Paint, motor oil, antifreeze, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals and propane cylinders are household hazardous waste and go to the town's collection day instead. Pull them into a corner before a crew arrives so nothing is loaded by mistake.

The rest divides cleanly. Steel shelving, a dead mower, bicycles and old wire are scrap, which lowers the price of a load rather than raising it, because Massachusetts has banned metals from disposal since 1 July 2006. Tires are the opposite, at roughly $5 to $20 each, because whole tires have been banned from landfill since 1991 and have to be shredded. Almost every garage in this town has a set nobody knew what to do with.

The western half of town is a different place

Westfield covers a lot of ground, and as you head west toward Russell and Granville it stops being suburban and becomes hill country. Larger properties, longer driveways, woodland, and outbuildings that have been standing for a very long time.

Those jobs are barn and property clearances rather than garage clearances, and they run to several truckloads. Mention it if your driveway is long, steep or unpaved, particularly after a wet spell. A loaded truck that cannot turn around or that sinks on the way out is a bigger problem than anything in it.

The Westfield River side of town brings the other seasonal job, which is brush and storm debris. Yard waste has been banned from Massachusetts disposal since the early nineties, so it goes to composting or chipping. It is priced by volume and brush is mostly air, so cutting branches down before the truck arrives genuinely lowers the bill.