Scheduling FAQ

  • We service 20 distinct neighborhoods in the Denver metro area. Once you sign up, you will be assigned a consistent pickup day based on your address. For example: We serve the City Park neighborhood on the first Monday of the month, the Sloan’s Lake neighborhood on the First Tuesday of the month, and so on. Please place your items out for collection by 8:30am on your assigned pickup day. Our driver will arrive to pick up your items anytime between 8:30am and 3:30pm that day.

  • Your pickup schedule will remain consistent each month, except in the case of the following planned holidays: New Year’s Day, Christmas Day, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, or the day after Thanksgiving Day. If your regularly-scheduled pickup falls on one of these holidays, we will reschedule for another date and let you know well in advance.

  • Depending on the severity of the weather, we may push back our pickup hours or reschedule for a later date. We will communicate via email and text if your scheduled date is altered in any way.

  • All active Happy Beetle subscribers have access to their own customer portal, which provides a service calendar of all upcoming pickup dates in the year ahead.

  • Yes! You will receive both an email and a text reminder the day before your scheduled pickup. You can always elect to opt out of these reminders in your customer portal, but we recommend opting in to make sure you don’t forget!

  • Simply reply “skip” to the text reminder you’ll receive the day before your pickup. A $3 credit will be added to your account and will automatically be applied to any future subscription renewals or surcharge invoices.

    If you prefer to skip a pickup date further in advance, you can also do so directly from the service calendar on your customer portal.

  • On your customer portal you’ll find a form called “Request a Change of Address,” where you can indicate your new address and the date of your move. Once you submit the form, we will send you an email confirmation and let you know if your scheduled pickup day has changed.

  • Submit the form entitled “Subscription Change” on your customer portal. Upon submission, we’ll send you an email confirmation with information about any adjustments to your billing and/or pickup schedule.

  • Fill out the “Cancellation Request” form on your customer portal. We’ll refund the remaining account balance to your credit card or bank account, minus a 5% processing fee. We’ll also follow up with a detailed confirmation email.

  • No. We operate entirely on a subscription model for residential customers. This allows us to keep our prices low by averaging out the monthly recycling costs of the materials collected.

  • No, we do not offer any drop-off services at this time.

  • Sometimes, depending on location and scheduling constraints.

    Please email us at support@thehappybeetle.com and we’ll see what we can do.

Item Acceptability FAQ

  • At The Happy Beetle, we strive to find innovative, local, and sustainable solutions for hard-to-recycle materials. While we're aware of new reuse opportunities for multi-layer plastics, the solutions do not currently meet our strict thresholds for being a viable material to consider. Specifically, we are not confident that the additional greenhouse gas emissions required to ship the product across the country are sufficiently counter-balanced by the limited and niche utilization of these new products. In comparison, our #2 and #4 plastic films are compressed and shipped to Nevada where they are used to produce recycled plastic lumber - a superior product than traditional lumber for many applications with a long lifespan! Our analysis has not reached the same conclusion regarding multilayer plastics. Unfortunately, in our opinion, the most responsible action for this material is to dispose of it and most importantly, avoid buying products with multilayer plastics in the first place.

  • No, please only include accepted items in your collection.

    Including items that aren’t on our accepted list causes contamination, increased costs, and the possibility that those items end up in the landfill.

  • No, those items can go in the single stream curbside bin provided by your city or municipality.

  • Please send us an email at support@thehappybeetle.com with any questions about item acceptability. Feel free to send pictures too!

    We’ll get back to you as soon as possible to let you know if we can accept your items or not. If we can’t accept them, we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction.

Pickup FAQ

  • If it's your first pickup, you can place your items out for collection in any bags or boxes you do not need back.

    We know that our subscribers often have a lot of items at their first pickups, so we offer an extra allowance to make sure to accommodate everyone's decluttering needs! We just ask that you make it clear which items are for us (a small Happy Beetle sign works) and limit your collection to what our driver can carry within two trips from your front door.

    Once our driver picks up your first collection, they will leave two reusable Happy Beetle bags on your doorstep. You can use those two Happy Beetle bags for pickups going forward and we’ll replace them with two clean bags each time we service your home.

  • Nope. You can if you want to be extra helpful, but our sorters will take care of everything once your bags are back at our warehouse.

  • Each pickup allows for two Happy Beetle bags, plus one additional bag, box, or large item (such as one 5-gallon bucket or four 1-gallon cans of paint, one television or other large electronic, one carseat, etc.)

  • Each of our collection bags measures 18 x 23 inches. All residential customer receive two of these bags at each pickup.

  • If certain items do not reasonably fit within the provided collection bags, feel free to place them in a larger container as your “plus one” item.

    Forcing bulky or sharp items into the bags can damage the fabric, making it difficult to reuse the bags for future collections.

  • Please spread out your items between pickup occasions. If you are on a quarterly subscription, consider upgrading to a monthly frequency instead.

  • It's not possible for us to fully test every single toaster oven or printer that comes through our warehouse. Clarifying the functionality of your electronics helps us know which items can be donated for reuse, versus which should be scrapped for recyclable components.

  • Unfortunately, recycling certain items can be quite expensive and labor-intensive. Adding a surcharge for the costly processing of items such as televisions, large appliances, fire extinguishers, and fluorescent tubes allows us to keep our base subscription fees as low as they are.

Other FAQ

  • Yes, please spread the word! Copy and paste the special link on your customer portal to share with your friends and neighbors. For each new sign-up, you’ll get $5 towards your account and they get $5 off as well!

  • Yes! If you’re already a member, you can purchase gift certificates directly through your customer portal.

    If you’re not a member, you can buy gift certificates on our online form.