Serving south Fort Worth, the Old Hemphill Road Drop-off Station sits at 6260 Old Hemphill Road. It forms part of the city's four-site drop-off network, free at the point of use for households that already pay Fort Worth for rubbish collection, and closed to everybody else.

Check the day before you load up: the operating pattern is Tuesday to Friday, 8am to 5pm, then a short Saturday of 8am to noon, and the site does not open at all on Mondays or Sundays. Older directory entries showing a Monday to Friday week that runs to 6pm are out of date. Nine public holidays also close the gates, from Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth through to New Year's Day, including the Friday that follows Thanksgiving.

Proof of eligibility is a pair of items, not one. Staff want to see a Fort Worth water bill issued within the last six months on which sanitation charges appear under Account Activity, together with a driving licence carrying the same address. Apartment dwellers in the city are treated differently: a licence by itself admits them, though only with recyclables and household chemicals. The account holder must attend personally, so handing your bill to a friend or a hired helper achieves nothing. Commercial loads and anyone living outside the city limits are refused outright.

Volume restrictions apply across the whole network rather than per site. Renovation and small repair debris is capped at five cubic yards on a single visit each month. Four passenger tyres are allowed per household in a six-month window, separated from their rims. Two computers or televisions are permitted every six months. Chemicals are held to twenty gallons a quarter per household, tubed fluorescent lighting to ten in that same quarter, and the free shredding service to three letter or legal boxes per visit, six per quarter. Exceeding a limit sends the entire load away.

Materials welcomed here include household waste in bags, blue-cart recyclables, metal items ranging from fencing and posts to skillets and baking trays, oversized bulky trash, garden waste in paper sacks, white goods and air-conditioning units, electronic equipment, small garden machinery with the fuel and oil drained, extinguishers and clean Styrofoam free of ink or dye. Turned back at the gate are loads left uncovered, loose debris that has not been bagged, rubbish generated by tenants of a property you rent out, hardcore such as brick, soil and tiling, shingles and other roofing, asbestos-bearing building material, gas bottles of every kind, explosives, radioactive articles, and titled machines such as motorcycles.

On transport, a single-axle trailer no longer than eight feet and no wider than six is the maximum, loaded no higher than three feet. Dual-axle trailers and box trucks are barred, as are vans and pickups carrying company markings. Expect to do your own unloading unless you have arranged assistance in advance; under-twelves and animals must remain in the car, and there is no smoking anywhere on the site. Whatever the station declines may instead be taken to Southeast Landfill on Salt Road, number 6288, where charges apply. The 311 contact centre is on (817) 392-1234.