Maui landfill guide: hours, fees, and what the gate turns away

The Central Maui Landfill sits at Pulehu Road and Hansen Road, a mile mauka of Hansen Road in Puʻunēnē. The scale house address is 1 Pulehu Road. It's open Monday to Saturday, 6am to 3pm, and closed every Sunday (Maui County). Scale house phone: (808) 270-6153, option 2.

Finding the entrance is the first test. There are two, one for residents and one for commercial accounts, and one reviewer who took the wrong lane got "asked many questions to determine if I was residential" (Google review, December 2022).

Another's directions are the best I've read: coming from Kahului, look for the big catch fence on the left, and the entry is on your left as soon as you top the small hill. He missed it and had to make a u-turn. So will you, once.

Inside, you don't drive out to the working face. Residents back into one of about ten bays at the entrance and toss rubbish into a roll-off bin about 8 feet below, and the whole path is paved, so any car works (Google review, November 2025).

The county's own operations plan calls it Station 2, and says the average residential load is about 200 pounds (landfill operations plan). Your pickup bed is normal. Nobody is judging.

About Sundays, since it's the most-searched question on this topic: the landfill was open seven days until July 2010, when the county cut Sunday hours in the recession. A 2016 estimate put Sunday overtime at $262,737 a year, and the 2019 pledge to bring Sundays back was pulled within the month (Maui News, January 2019). Saturday is your weekend. Get there early.

The scale attendant sorts you into resident or commercial by what you drive and what you say, and the price follows from that. Residents pay $5 a load and need no account. Commercial haulers and businesses hauling their own rubbish must have a commercial account, opened at the scale house, and get billed by the ton (Maui County).

Here's where it bites. A resident who brought his own house garbage in his work van got turned away and kept the trash another week until he had a different vehicle (Google review, February 2024). The van decided, not the bags. If your only vehicle has a company name on the door, bring your ID and take the residential lane.

That C&D rule is why a contractor's dump run costs more. He's on the clock, he can't go Saturday, and if his load is more than half lightweight material he has to be there before 8am (Maui County). Every one-star comment on the landfill's Google page is about this line: being classed as commercial, or being quizzed about green waste. None of them are about the dump itself.

Residents pay $5 per load at the Central Maui Landfill, cash, credit or debit, with a 2.35% processing fee on cards (Maui County). Every other county landfill and the Olowalu center is free for residents. Reddit still remembers it as cash only. It isn't, but bring a $5 bill anyway if you're the type who checks the stove twice before a trip.

Five dollars is not what a visit costs the county. When the fee was $3, the county said the real cost was about $12 per person, and that vehicles dropped from about 600 a day to about 445 a day once people had to pay, while tonnage stayed at about 2,000 tons a month (Maui News, March 2018). Fewer cars, same trash. People just stopped driving over with one bag.

One thing I can't confirm: a couple of reviewers say residents are limited to two loads a day, and another says nobody counts. No county page mentions a cap (Yahoo Local). If you're planning three trips, ask the attendant on the first one.

The county's banned list, word for word: agricultural wastes, bulk liquids, drums with liquids, un-solidified paint, commercial construction and demolition debris, appliances, air conditioners, vehicle batteries, tires, vehicles, propane tanks (Maui County). Read that again with your garage in mind. The fridge, the AC, the tires and the half can of paint are the exact things that made you load the truck.

The good news is that almost every banned item has a free home within a mile or two of the gate. The bad news is that each one keeps its own hours, and two of them are open a couple of half-days a week. Here's the map.

One more that catches people: the recycling drop-off at the gate refuses styrofoam, plastic bags, tubs and buckets, plastics other than #1 and #2, magazines, ceramics, light bulbs and foil (Maui County). Those go in the $5 pile, which is fine. Just don't argue about the yogurt tub. You'll lose, and there's a line.

On county holidays the Central Maui Landfill and Maui EKO run condensed hours, 6am to noon. Olowalu runs 8am to noon on some of them, and the Hāna, Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi landfills close. That's the pattern the county posted for King Kamehameha Day in June 2026 (Maui County, June 2026), and it's the same shape every year for the big three.

Those three rows are from the county's 2026 holiday schedule (Maui County). Olowalu is the one that changes: it opened New Year's morning in 2023 and closed it in 2024 (Hoodline, December 2024). If it's a holiday and you're on the West Side, call before you load.

Then there are the closures nobody schedules. A green waste fire shut the landfill for a weekend in August 2017, with smoke over the roads (Maui Now, August 2017). A fire under a compost heap did it again in November 2023.

In September 2026, Hurricane Lowell flooding closed Olowalu for a day (Maui Now, September 2026). The catch for West Maui: Olowalu's rubbish gets trucked to Puʻunēnē, so when Central closes, Olowalu can close with it (Maui News, August 2017).

The county posts closures on its news flashes and Facebook page, not on the landfill page. So the scale house number is a real tool: (808) 270-6153. One reviewer showed up at 1 o'clock to a locked gate after calling several times with no answer (Google review, August 2022). Call, and if nobody picks up, check the county's Facebook before you drive.

If you live in Lahaina, the Maui landfill is about 45 minutes away each way, over the pali, before you've joined a line. The closer option is the Olowalu Recycling and Refuse Convenience Center, about 3 miles south of Lahaina at Honoapiʻilani Highway and Olowalu Village Road. Monday to Saturday, 8am to 2:30pm, free, residents only, no commercial loads (Maui County).

Olowalu takes household rubbish, recycling and used motor oil. There's a big oil tank on the right when you pull up, and the local advice is to bring gloves and paper towels (r/maui). It takes none of the banned list: no appliances or tires, and no construction debris.

To clear up a mix-up that comes up in every Olowalu thread: the convenience center is not the wildfire debris site. That was a separate lined cell five miles south of Lahaina, emptied by October 2025 and since restored (Maui County).

So the West Side math for a full pickup with a fridge in it: Olowalu won't take the fridge, and Puʻunēnē won't either, so you're driving to Hammerhead in the baseyard first, then the landfill, then home. Call it a morning plus $5 and gas, and add the line on a Saturday. On our own jobs the landfill leg is about two hours out of the day (our Lahaina junk removal page has the whole timeline). That's the honest reason a dump run is a service and not just a favor.

Hāna has its own landfill on Waikoloa Road, across from the Hāna recycling center, free for residents with motor oil recycling. Appliances, metals and tires there have no everyday home. They get collected at events, like the one in March 2026 (Maui County).