52 Weeks to an Organized Home: Create a home recycling center (plus dealing with trash) (Week 6)

For Week 6, the focus is on creating a home recycling center (plus dealing with trash).

We use a waste management company that takes both our garbage and recycling. For recycling, we don't have to separate anything. It all goes in one bin.

This makes it very easy for us to recycle. All we have to do is have a bag under the sink and fill it with recyclables.

Bag for recycling under the sink.

I also have plastic bags upstairs in the closet for gathering newspapers, magazines, and any other recyclable paper or plastic products from the bedrooms and bathroom.

When a bag is full, we bring it to our recycling can that is picked up bi-monthly. It has a lid which is nice. This prevents animals from accessing the contents.

The recycling bin is on the left and

the garbage bin is on the right.

The recycling can is on wheels, so we just bring it to the end of our driveway which is about a hundred feet long. It's not a long walk, so we don't have to do anything special in terms of hauling the cans back and forth.

In terms of trash, many rooms have trash cans (e.g., kitchen, two bathrooms, two home offices, two bedrooms). Since we live in an 1890s home, many of the rooms are so close to one another that we can just walk a few steps and put trash in another room. In this way, we don't have an excessive number of trash cans throughout the home. Seven trash cans seems more than sufficient.