Here in LA, there was no municipal garbage collection until the '50s. Most folks disposed of trash by burning it in a backyard incinerator. Trash too awkward or difficult to burn piled up until you had a pickup-load, and then you would haul the truckload off to the dump (if you had a pickup; otherwise you’d pay someone with a pickup). Most dumps then burned anything the scavengers didn’t take.
But the Killer Smogs that enveloped LA in the '50s led to the banning of backyard incinerators and the institution of regular municipal trash collection and landfilling.
(Though even today, multifamily buildings like apartments rely on private haulers. Generally, the cost is folded into the rent.)
Single-family homes pay a collection fee to the City.
In an amusing twist, the City Council tried to roughly double the fee to raise revenue to pay for more police (thus evading the voter supermajority required for a tax increase), but the courts said, no, garbage collection fees can only pay for garbage collection.
So the city audited the Sanitation Dept’s collection costs, and discovered that the fees only paid about a third of the actual cost of collection - so they tripled the collection fees, and used the resulting general-fund savings at Sanitation to hire more cops.
