Garden-Ville SARA on FM 1516 in Converse is a brush and green-waste facility, not a rubbish tip, and turning up with a mixed household load is an expensive mistake. The site takes tree limbs, trunks, prunings and other untreated woody material from the north-east side of the San Antonio metro and grinds it for reuse rather than burying it. Texas Disposal Systems operates it under the Garden-Ville name.

Pricing is refreshingly simple. Brush is $80.00 a ton with a one-ton minimum, which means the smallest possible transaction at this gate is $80.00 plus sales tax. A pickup bed of limbs will usually fall well under a ton, so the minimum is what most householders actually pay. If you are clearing a lot after storm damage, or after taking down a mature tree, the per-ton rate starts to work in your favour and this becomes one of the cheaper disposal routes in Bexar County.

The critical rule is contamination. Loads that contain trash, dirt, treated timber, painted wood or any other unacceptable material attract a $300.00 contamination fee — nearly four times the minimum charge. Because the material is destined to be processed into mulch and compost, a single bag of household waste or a few treated fence pickets buried in a trailer can trigger it. Sort at home, not at the scale.

Brush tipping starts at 7 each weekday morning and stops at 3 in the afternoon; Saturday tipping ends at midday, and the yard does not open on Sunday. Note that the tipping window closes at 3 p.m. on weekdays, earlier than most disposal sites in the region, so an after-work run is not an option here. Sales tax applies to all charges. If your load is genuinely mixed, a bulky waste centre or a transfer station is the right destination instead.