There is a version of junk removal that is just a truck and a landfill fee. Jake Still of Junk Rescue runs a different one, and the difference is entirely in what happens between the pickup and the tip.
Every Load Gets Sorted Three Ways
Still described the core of the service on the Unscripted Small Business podcast:
“We’ll come in, remove everything that’s left over, and we’ll source separate everything — donation, trash, recycling — and take it where it needs to go.”
— Jake Still, Junk Rescue
He is honest that a large part of the value is simply absorbing friction. He points out that people underestimate the physical cost — “physically doing it hurts” — and then hit a second wall at the donation end: “you go try to take it to Goodwill, and Goodwill has a surplus now, and they don’t take much stuff now too, so you might get turned away.”
That is the whole argument for sorting as a discipline rather than an intention. Everyone means to donate the good chairs. Almost nobody gets them accepted on the first attempt.
How Far Behind The US Actually Is
Asked where the American waste stream is heading, Still did not hedge.
“what’s going on in the US is not sustainable. Other countries are ahead of us on the curve, especially countries like Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, that part of Europe.”
— Jake Still
His specific worry is the gap between what we believe is recyclable and what actually gets recycled: “even though we think it’s recyclable, a lot of it doesn’t end up being recycled. Our filtering and our systems just aren’t up to par.”
And the downstream consequence he raises is not aesthetic. “Landfills are getting overrun. There’s a lot of things that you don’t even realize when you go to a landfill that can contaminate the water source below.”
The Disposable Society Problem
Still’s diagnosis is economic rather than moral. He walks through the collapse in the price of durable goods — a 55-inch screen for $180 where a plasma “used to be a big heavy TV and be like five grand,” an $80 desk off Amazon — and lands on four words:
“We live in a disposable society.”
— Jake Still
He connects it back to materials: “we live in a consumer buy-buy-buy society, and with plastics being involved now in the last roughly a hundred years.” When replacement is cheaper than repair, the sorting problem is not going to be solved at the household level by good intentions.
What A Cleanup Event Can Divert In One Morning
We are not going to put a number on this, because the honest answer is that it depends entirely on the site, the season and how many volunteers turn up.
What we will say is that the diversion rate is set before anyone picks up a bag. If there is one dumpster on site, everything goes to landfill. If there are three clearly labelled stations and one volunteer whose only job is to stand at them, you get a genuine sort — and you get a defensible number to publish afterwards instead of a guess.
Weigh what you can. Count what you cannot. Publish both, and say which is which.
Partnering With A Hauler For Your Event
The operators who already sort are the ones to approach, because the capability is built and the disposal relationships exist. That is a very different conversation from asking a general hauler to do something they have no route for.
Bring them in at the planning stage rather than the pickup stage. They will tell you what the site can realistically handle, what they can take for free, and what carries a fee — which is also the information you need before you promise a sponsor anything.
More on how the events work in the community event marketing flywheel and our events calendar.
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