Materials

Getting Rid of Soil and Fill in North County

Two things about soil catch people out here: what it weighs, and one location-specific check that is worth five minutes before you dig.

Soil is heavier than anyone expects

Of everything a homeowner throws away, soil is the material most likely to produce a bill nobody anticipated.

Rough working figures: topsoil runs around 1,800 to 2,200 lb per cubic yard, and wet clay — which is what a great deal of this region sits on — is heavier still. A 10 yard container filled with damp clay is well beyond what a truck can legally lift.

A worked example. Digging out a modest patio area, say 12 feet by 15 feet to a depth of eight inches, is about four and a half cubic yards of spoil — call it four tons. That is a 10 yard container at capacity from a hole most people would describe as small.

Add the clay we have here, add rain in the week before, and the same hole gets heavier again. Wet soil can weigh a quarter more than dry.

Clean fill is a category with a definition

"Clean fill" is not a description, it is a classification, and it determines where material can go and what it costs.

Champ Landfill in Maryland Heights — the permitted regional facility that handles most of north county's waste — accepts clean fill soil and concrete and asphalt as named categories, separately from general construction debris. Clean material has a cheaper and simpler route.

Broadly, clean fill means soil, rock, concrete, brick and asphalt with nothing else in it. No timber, no plastic, no roots and vegetation, no rubbish, no chemicals.

The commercial logic is worth understanding: clean fill is potentially useful. It gets reused as engineered fill, grading material and site levelling. Once it is contaminated with anything else, it stops being a resource and becomes waste, which costs more to dispose of.

What contaminates a fill load

Easier to spoil than people expect, and the usual culprits are mundane:

• Roots, sod and vegetation. Very common on a garden excavation, and yard waste has to stay separate anyway — see here.
• Timber offcuts that fell in while forms were being stripped.
• Landscape fabric and plastic sheeting, which come up with almost every old bed.
• Old irrigation line, edging and wire.
• Buried household rubbish. On older properties around here, people genuinely did bury things.
• Fuel or oil-stained soil, usually near an old shed, a generator or a former tank.

The last one matters more than the others. Visibly stained or strong-smelling soil is not clean fill and is not ordinary waste either — that is a conversation to have before it moves, not after.

Sizing a container for dirt

The pattern is consistent: for heavy material you get volume through swaps, not through a bigger container. A 30 yard of soil is not a service anybody can legally provide.

⚠️ If you are digging near Coldwater Creek

One location-specific check, and it applies to a minority of properties in our area.

Coldwater Creek runs through Florissant and north St. Louis County. Parts of the creek, its banks and its floodplain carry radiological contamination originating from Manhattan Project-era waste handling in the region. The US Army Corps of Engineers runs an ongoing federal cleanup along the creek under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, and has done for years — sampling, remediating properties, and posting signage along affected stretches.

We are a hauling company, not a health authority, and we are not going to tell you what any of that means for your family. The Corps assesses individual properties and publishes its findings, and they are the people who actually know. What we can tell you is the practical part that touches our job:

So if you are excavating soil on a property in or near the creek's floodplain, the sequence is:

1. Contact the Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis District before the work, and ask whether your property is within the area they are assessing. This is free, it is what they are there for, and the answer for most properties is straightforward.
2. If your property is not within an area of concern, the soil is ordinary spoil and we haul it like any other fill.
3. If it is, the Corps will explain the process. Do not let anybody — us included — haul that material to a commercial landfill.

This is a five-minute phone call that only matters for a small number of addresses. We raise it because a hauler who says nothing is not doing you a favour, and because the facility we use will not take the material anyway.

What we will and will not haul

Clear about our own limits, since being vague here helps nobody.

We will haul: clean fill — soil, clay, rock, brick, concrete and asphalt with nothing mixed in. Sized for weight, in a small container, with swaps if you need volume.

We will not haul:

• Soil requiring federal radiological screening. Not our process, not our facility's either.
• Visibly contaminated soil — fuel, oil, solvent staining or a strong chemical smell.
• Soil from a known former tank or spill location without an assessment first.
• Anything we have been asked not to ask questions about. That request is itself the answer.

None of that is us being difficult. Mis-declared material at a permitted facility is a serious problem for the customer, the hauler and the site, and the sensible time to sort it out is before a truck is loaded.

Getting rid of soil without paying to bury it

Often the cheapest answer is not a container at all, and we would rather say so.

• Reuse it on site. Regrading, raising a bed, backfilling elsewhere. Moving soil twenty feet is free; moving it twenty miles is not.
• Give it away. Clean topsoil and clean fill both find takers locally, particularly among people levelling a yard or building beds. Neighbours first.
• Separate the concrete. Clean concrete and asphalt have their own route and should never be buried inside a mixed load.
• Let it dry. If a job can wait for a dry spell, soil hauled dry can weigh meaningfully less than the same soil hauled after rain.
• Strip the topsoil separately from clay subsoil. The topsoil is the part somebody wants.

A short pre-dig checklist

• Estimate the cubic yards, then estimate the tons — that is the number that matters
• Call 811 for utility locates before any excavation, always
• Near Coldwater Creek? Call the Army Corps St. Louis District first
• Decide whether any of it can be reused on site or given away
• Plan to keep roots, sod, timber and plastic out of the fill container
• Separate clean concrete and asphalt into their own load
• Expect a small container part-filled, with swaps for volume
• Check the driveway can carry a loaded truck — boards go down as standard
• Tell us if the ground has ever held a tank, a generator or a fuel store