Going without garbage service

Dan Proctor (aka the UniBaker) ran into the same scenario many years ago. The ordinance requires you to have service. He generates essentially zero waste. If you are renting, you can probably get away with not having service and you'll have to get a friend or relative to take your trash. It's illegal to dump your waste in someone else's trash bin without permission. If it's a really small amount, you could probably use a bin at a convenience store.

Compostable food-waste drop off is free at a number of locations.

Household recycling is also free at a number of locations on the WLSSD website. 

What little else you have can be dropped off at your local convenience store receptacle.

If you don't want to give it to the convenience stores there is a transfer station in Brookston you could take it to once you accumulate enough garbage to justify a trip.

Also, Hartels offers a once-a-month pickup, which we use as we, also, generate little garbage.

I used to drop a small plastic bag of trash at the gas station, and recycling at WLSSD on Rice Lake Road. Ahh, the good old days.

No. You own a house, you pay for garbage service. It is a Duluth city ordinance.

Dropping your trash at a convenience store is low-level unethical, but still unethical.

Good lord. I think the positive ethics of only producing enough garbage that one drops it in a convenience store receptacle outweighs the "unethical" behavior of doing so.

You should drop it at work, but only after you've helped establish a recycling program there.

Garbage costs money to haul away, dropping it in someone else's trash receptacle - business or non-business - without that person's permission is a form of theft. 

If you don't want to pay for your own service due to low production, go in with a neighbor on garbage service. That is what we have done for 10+ years. Even with two households we only need a 20 gallon can.

And as Edgeways stated, there is always once a month pick-up.

The garbage disposal problem has an easy solution: Skyline Parkway.

You can also get them to put an insert into your can that reduces the volume of the can, and they charge you  less. We did that with the once a month and it was perfect.

As long as it is ethical to drop of the trash from the back of your car at a convenience store when you get a coke and chips, I would think it is ethical to drop off household trash as well. This is assuming that all the compostable waste and recycling is dealt with separately, and we are talking about dropping off a tiny handful of trash as the OP implies. 

Frankly, I don't have much in the way of "trash" that isn't either compostable or recyclable. It would be no more per month than the trash in the back of my car.

There's lots of businesses that accept small amounts of trash as long as you're a patron.  What's unethical is burying large amounts of unnecessary non biodegradable plastic human bull shit in the earth, burning large amounts of diesel to do it, chopping down forests and jungles to raise animals to stuff into plastic packages. Mining the plastic and on and on...  Unethical is the untold product put in more plastic just to isolate from plastic.  Send it back to from where it came. Post your dirty diapers to congress.

"We release our poisons like Styrofoam"  Ian McKaye