Weight-limited vs. volume-limited materials
Every material falls into one of two camps, and knowing which one changes how you size a container.
Weight-limited materials like concrete and dirt are dense. A standard dumpster hits its weight cap with just a couple of cubic yards, so the right move is a small heavy-debris container, not a big box you can't fill. Volume-limited materials like hardwood and framing lumber are the opposite: you run out of space long before you approach the weight limit, so size by how much room the debris takes.
Get that backwards and you either overpay for empty space or blow past a weight cap into overage fees. Each guide tells you which camp its material is in.
Where the numbers come from
Trust is the point of these pages, so every figure traces to a primary source: the American Concrete Institute and state DOT specs for concrete, the USDA Forest Products Laboratory Wood Handbook for wood, and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service data for soil. Where common recycling tables undercount dense materials, we flag it and use the physical density instead.
Size your project
Once you know the weight, these calculators size the dumpster and account for it.