The Maine Agenda › Live in Maine

Trash and Recycling by Town in Greater Portland, Maine: What a Bag Actually Costs

Published July 12, 2026 · Updated August 14, 2026 · 13 min read

A 33-gallon town trash bag costs $5.54 in Falmouth and $2.50 in Cumberland. Those towns share a border. Nothing about the trash is different, nothing about the truck is different, and in both places the bag ends up at the same incinerator on Blueberry Road in Portland. You are paying 2.2 times as much to throw the same thing away because of which side of a line your house sits on.

That number is the part almost nobody publishes. Every guide to moving here will tell you which towns use special bags. None of them tells you what the bags cost, which is the only part of the answer that turns into money. So this page is the price list, read off each town's own website on August 14, 2026, along with the one town in the region where the whole system changes this month.

The short version

Prices per bag, current on each town's own site as of August 14, 2026.

Per gallon, the large bags run $0.067 in Yarmouth, $0.076 in Cumberland, $0.091 in Gorham, $0.127 in Portland and $0.168 in Falmouth. North Yarmouth's cannot be computed.

Three things fall out of that table that are worth more than the individual numbers.

Falmouth is the expensive one and it is not close. At $0.168 a gallon its large bag costs two and a half times Yarmouth's. Falmouth's prices are labelled "Effective 7-1-26" on the town's own page, meaning they changed six weeks ago, which is why every roundup you will find still quotes older figures.

Portland is the only town that does not penalize the small bag. Portland charges $1.90 for 15 gallons and $3.80 for 30, exactly the same rate per gallon either way. Everywhere else the small bag is worse value, and in Falmouth it is dramatically worse: $3.58 for 13 gallons works out to $0.275 a gallon, a 64 percent penalty against Falmouth's own large bag. If you live in Falmouth and buy the small bag out of habit, stop.

North Yarmouth is the one town you cannot price. Its site lists orange bags at $15.00 a roll in both 15 and 33 gallon sizes and never says how many bags are in a roll. Same price for either size, no count, so there is no way to work out what a bag costs from anything the town publishes. Call the town office before you assume it is cheap.

Gorham is changing right now, and its own website has not caught up

This is the item with a deadline on it.

Gorham has run a tag system: you buy a sheet of five tags and tie one to the top of an ordinary trash bag. Pink sheets are $7.50 for bags up to 15 gallons, yellow sheets are $15.00 for bags up to 33 gallons, so $1.50 and $3.00 a bag. Casella has collected it since July 1, 2020.

That ends this fall. The town's transition notice, posted after Public Works met with Casella's operations team on August 6, 2026, says carts are scheduled to arrive at the end of August, delivered by route number with the households whose collection day is changing getting theirs first, and that automated collection begins in mid-September. Roll-off containers will be on site for roughly two weeks during cart delivery so residents can get rid of their old cans and bins.

Two sentences in that notice matter to a Gorham resident this week, and neither is anywhere else.

Tags are still required until mechanical collection actually starts. A bag without a tag will not be collected. Carts arriving in your driveway does not change this; the switchover does.

There is no refund on unused tags. The town says so plainly and adds that residents should buy tags on an as-needed basis. If you have a habit of picking up a few sheets whenever you are at the store, this is the month to stop. The town is also deliberately running its retail vendors out of stock, after which tags will only be available at Town Hall, Public Works and Baxter Memorial Library.

Worth saying why this page spells all that out: Gorham's own Public Works trash page, read on August 14, 2026, still describes the tag system in the present tense and does not mention the cart rollout at all. The transition notice lives in the town news feed. Both pages are official, both are current, and neither points at the other.

Town by town

Portland runs pay-as-you-throw with purple city bags: $1.90 for 15 gallons, $3.80 for 30 gallons, and a roll is $19.00 either way, ten small bags or five large. The current price took effect July 1, 2024 as part of the FY2025 budget. Recycling is separate, free, and goes in a blue cart. Trash and recycling must be curbside by 6:30 a.m., the earliest deadline in the region. The city strongly suggests putting the purple bags inside a generic container, because birds and vermin tear them open and the resulting mess is your littering citation, not theirs.

Falmouth uses yellow town bags, and the current prices are labelled effective July 1, 2026: $3.58 for 13 gallons, $5.54 for 33 gallons, sold in packages of ten at $35.80 and $55.40. Oversized items need a $5.00 disposal tag each. The bag has to go inside a town-issued cart; Casella runs the route and has converted Falmouth to automated collection, so a rear-loading truck is not coming. Curbside by 7 a.m. Bags are at Hannaford in Falmouth, Portland and Yarmouth, Shaw's in Falmouth and Portland, Market Basket in Westbrook, Eldredge Lumber, Rosemont, Town Landing Market and Waldo's.

Cumberland uses green town bags inside a Casella cart: $25.00 for ten 33-gallon bags, $12.50 for ten 14-gallon, so $2.50 and $1.25 each. Recycling rides in a second Casella cart on the same day. Carts out by 7 a.m., not before 6 p.m. the night before. Bags are sold at the Town Hall, Hannaford in West Falmouth, Shaw's in Falmouth, Hannaford in Yarmouth, Town Landing Market and Food Stop.

Yarmouth bags are blue, which no other guide seems to mention, and they are the cheapest in the region: $2.00 for a 30-gallon, $1.25 for a 15-gallon. Yarmouth adopted pay-as-you-throw in 2019. The structure is different from its neighbors: the town runs a Transfer and Recycling Center on Main Street rather than a municipal curbside route, and residents who want curbside pickup contract privately for it. Either way the official blue town bag is required, including through a private hauler, because the town still pays the tipping fee at the end of the line. Bags are at Hannaford, Ace at Coastal Hardware and Rosemont in Yarmouth, Shaw's in Freeport and Falmouth, and Market Basket in Westbrook.

North Yarmouth uses orange bags, $15.00 a roll in either 15 or 33 gallon, and the town does not publish the number of bags in a roll. Recycling goes loose in the cart; anything set beside the cart in a bag, bin or flattened box will not be collected. The enforcement ladder is unusually explicit and worth reading before you improvise: a first offense gets a warning, a second gets a final warning, and on the third the crew takes the trash out of your cart, leaves it at your house, and removes the cart.

South Portland issues every eligible household two barrels, green for trash and blue for recycling, collected weekly by Casella and hauled to ecomaine. Nothing to buy. There is an opt-in curbside food-waste program for residents who want to compost.

Scarborough switched haulers on July 1, 2026 from Casella to Garbage to Garden. Six weeks in, the thing worth saying is what did not change: the town confirms routes and collection days stayed the same and households kept the same bins. If you were bracing for disruption, there was not any. What is new is opt-in curbside composting. Yard waste still goes to the Casella Transfer Station free of charge, and there is a free public compost drop-off bin at Public Works, 20 Washington Avenue. Collection remains funded through taxes.

Westbrook is cart-based and automated, two color-coded city toters, both curbside by 7 a.m. Nothing to buy.

Gorham is covered in full above. Until mid-September it is a tag town at $1.50 and $3.00 a bag; after that it is a cart town with nothing to buy.

Cape Elizabeth runs no municipal curbside collection at all, which is the single fact that surprises new arrivals most. You haul your own to the Recycling Center on Dennison Drive, off Spurwink Avenue, or you hire a private hauler. You need a permit first, issued at the Recycling Center office on proof of residence, and it is easy to turn up without one. Non-recyclable rubbish from the hopper goes to ecomaine for incineration. Certain items carry a gate fee. The center also runs a Swap Shop and a bottle donation shed, and sells compost.

Windham provides curbside trash and recycling through its public works department. Confirm your bin setup and collection day when you set up service. The town sits at the outer edge of the region and we have not re-read its own site this season, so treat this line as a pointer rather than a verified fact.

The thing every town shares: ecomaine

Almost every community here sends its waste to ecomaine, the nonprofit, community-owned waste-to-energy and recycling operation on Blueberry Road in Portland, which serves more than 70 member communities. Trash is burned to generate electricity. Recycling is sorted next door at a single-sort facility.

Single-sort is why the recycling rules do not change when you cross a town line. Everything recyclable goes in one bin with no separating: cardboard, paper, cans, glass bottles and the accepted plastics together, empty and clean and dry and loose, never bagged.

Here is the part that usually gets stated wrong, including in the earlier version of this page. Recycling is free to you. It is not free to your town. Yarmouth publishes its tipping fees: $97.50 a ton for waste and $65.00 a ton for recycling. North Yarmouth publishes its FY26 numbers: $107.50 a ton for waste and $85.00 for recycling. Recycling costs roughly a third less than throwing the same weight away, which is a real saving and is the actual argument for the bin, but it is a discount, not a zero. That is also why contamination matters financially rather than morally: a rejected load gets charged at the trash rate.

The contamination list is uniform across the region. Plastic bags and film are the biggest offender because they tangle the sorting machinery, so grocery bags and bubble wrap go back to a store drop-off. Anything stringy jams it the same way: garden hoses, holiday lights, cords. Food-soiled containers and greasy pizza boxes contaminate what is around them. When you genuinely do not know, ecomaine runs a searchable tool called the Recyclopedia.

Why this belongs in your town comparison

Run the Falmouth number out. A household filling one 33-gallon bag a week pays about $288 a year in Falmouth and about $130 in Cumberland. That gap is not nothing, and it is invisible in every relocation calculator, because it does not appear on a tax bill or a listing. It shows up at the register, a few dollars at a time.

Neither model is automatically cheaper. In a cart town the cost is bundled into taxes you owe whether you throw out one bag or four, so a heavy household usually comes out ahead. In a pay-as-you-throw town a light household can spend almost nothing. What matters is knowing which model you are buying into, and at what rate, before you sign a lease or close.

It is the same lesson as the tax map: the sticker number lies until you know the mechanism. The recurring numbers are broken down in the Portland, Maine cost of living guide and the town-by-town property taxes by town comparison, and the full first-month checklist lives in moving to Portland, Maine. If Falmouth is on your list specifically, moving to Falmouth, Maine covers what that town runs differently, and now you know trash is one of them. The day you need to lose something too big or too toxic for the bin, getting rid of big and hazardous stuff follows a completely separate map. If the thing still works, skip the disposal fee and check where to donate used goods first. Leaves and brush run on a third map again, and only one town in the region collects them at the curb in the fall: leaves, brush, and yard waste by town. Burning the brush instead is legal with a free state permit, but two towns ban it on named streets: burn permits and open burning rules by town.

FAQ

How much does a town trash bag cost in Greater Portland, Maine?

Read off each town's own site on August 14, 2026: a large bag is $2.00 in Yarmouth (30 gallon), $2.50 in Cumberland (33 gallon), $3.00 in Gorham (33 gallon tag), $3.80 in Portland (30 gallon) and $5.54 in Falmouth (33 gallon). North Yarmouth sells orange bags at $15.00 a roll and does not publish how many bags are in a roll, so its per-bag price cannot be computed. South Portland, Scarborough and Westbrook have no bag to buy.

Which Greater Portland towns use pay-as-you-throw trash bags?

Portland (purple), Falmouth (yellow), Cumberland (green), Yarmouth (blue) and North Yarmouth (orange) all require official town bags. Gorham requires a purchased tag tied to an ordinary bag, but only until its automated cart collection starts in mid-September 2026. South Portland, Scarborough and Westbrook are cart-based with the cost in property taxes. Cape Elizabeth has no municipal curbside collection at all.

What is changing with trash collection in Gorham in 2026?

Gorham is ending its pay-as-you-throw tag program and moving to automated cart collection. Per the town's own transition notice, carts arrive at the end of August 2026 and collection begins in mid-September. Until the switchover, tags are still required and a bag without a tag will not be collected. Unused tags cannot be refunded, so the town advises buying them only as needed. Gorham's Public Works trash page had not been updated to reflect any of this as of August 14, 2026.

Can I use another town's trash bags?

No. Pay-as-you-throw bags are town-specific and crews collect only their own bag, identified by color and printing. A Portland purple bag will not be collected in Falmouth, and a Falmouth yellow bag will not be collected in Portland. In Yarmouth the official blue bag is required even when a private company is doing your curbside pickup.

Is recycling actually free?

Free to you, not to your town. Yarmouth publishes tipping fees of $97.50 a ton for waste and $65.00 a ton for recycling; North Yarmouth's FY26 figures are $107.50 and $85.00. Recycling costs a town roughly a third less than trash of the same weight, which is why towns push it, and why a contaminated load matters: it gets rejected and charged at the trash rate.

Does Cape Elizabeth have curbside trash pickup?

No. Cape Elizabeth runs no municipal curbside collection. Residents take household trash and recycling to the Recycling Center on Dennison Drive, off Spurwink Avenue, or contract with a private hauler. You need a permit first, issued at the Recycling Center office on proof of residence. Certain items carry a gate fee, and non-recyclable rubbish still goes to ecomaine.

What changed with trash collection in Scarborough in 2026?

On July 1, 2026, Scarborough replaced Casella with Garbage to Garden as its curbside hauler. The town confirms that routes, collection days and household bins all stayed the same, so for most residents nothing changed. What is new is opt-in curbside composting. Yard waste still goes to the Casella Transfer Station free, and there is a free compost drop-off at Public Works, 20 Washington Avenue.

Before you buy the bags

Find out which of the three models your town uses, then find out the rate, because the second half is the part that costs money and the part nobody prints. If it is pay-as-you-throw, learn the color and the price and buy the large bag unless you live in Portland, where the size makes no difference to the rate. If it is cart-based, ask when your carts arrive and which day is yours. If it is Cape Elizabeth, get the permit before your first trip. And if it is Gorham, buy tags one sheet at a time until the carts land, because the town will not take them back. While you are checking, look up your town's overnight and winter parking rules too, since start dates range from November 1 to December 1 and one town enforces its ban in July. When you are ready to think past the trash, moving to Portland, Maine walks through the rest of what changes the day you become a Mainer.