Gainesville's recycling centre shares a site with the city transfer station at 601 North Interstate 35, sitting on the north side of the scale house. Because the scale house handles the paperwork, whether you pay anything at all depends entirely on where you live.

City residents with an active water account use it free. Bring a copy of the current water bill, or a state-issued ID showing an address inside the city, and present it at the scale house on the way in. County residents are welcome too but are charged a flat $20.85, sales tax included, for a load of any size. There is no sliding scale and no small-load discount.

The centre was redesigned to make it easier to use, and the containers are colour-coded. Brown takes flattened cardboard, cereal boxes and cracker boxes. Green takes newspapers, office paper, phone books and magazines. Tan takes appliances — washers, dryers, hot water heaters and dishwashers. There are currently no containers for glass, plastic or aluminium at all, which is a significant limitation and one the city states plainly.

Refused items include plastic bags, food-soiled paper and pizza boxes, kitchen waste, yard waste and general trash, batteries of any kind, hardback books, household hazardous waste and toxic containers, plastic takeaway containers and utensils, polystyrene, and scrap aluminium or foil. Glass of any type has been banned since 15 March 2018.

The gates open at 8am on weekdays and close at 4pm. Saturday is a short morning, 8am to 11am, and the site shuts on Saturdays altogether between mid-January and mid-April. Sunday is closed. Payment for the county fee is taken at the adjoining transfer station, which accepts cash, cheques and credit cards but not American Express.