Apartment Recycling

From: fortytwostars

Okay. Recycling when you live in a house and have everything-in-one-bin curbside pickup? Easy. Way easy. I never really appreciated it until it was gone. Now that we're in an apartment with no recycling service (LAME), we have to sort it ourselves and take it to a recycling center. Fortunately, there's one about two minutes away from home, plus another right by work if the need arises. UNfortunately, recycling bins take up a lot of space if you have to sort things, and SUPER unfortunately, we have a teeeeeeeeeeeeeny tiny kitchen with no room for ANYTHING, much less four different bins.

But yay for my subscription to Ready Made.
I got THIS idea while flipping through an issue a few months back.
It's easy, it's light, and it takes up no floor space at all.

We have a few more bins than the one in the magazine because our recycling center accepts a LOT of stuff that has to be split up. Ours is also slightly more heavy duty, simply because we used the materials we could find in one trip rather than running all over town.

From the middle hook on the top there, we hang a plastic bag to collect plastic bags, which our local Kroger recycles. We do use cloth bags, but, yeah. There are forgetful days. Plus, Kroger accepts almost ALL overwrap and plasticy packaging, so we take that in, too.

It was a teensy bit of work to put together, but it makes recycling in a small space MUCH easier, and it's especially nice that it doesn't take up valuable room. The bins can be washed out in the bathtub if we forget to rinse something well enough and it leaks on the bottom, plus we have the lids for the bins off to the side to keep things from flying out if they're in the back of the truck.