How do you organise your rubbish?

Our council recently introduced another wheelie bin for kerbside collection. This means that they ought to be able to get better quality waste streams for recycling, which is great! However it means that I now need to separate out paper and card from cartons and metal waste, as well as from non recyclable waste, glass and compostable wastes.
At the moment I use open plastic crates by the kitchen bin. I occasionally get them in the shop with deliveries and can select ones which are stackable, so glass crate goes under paper crate which goes under cartons and metals. This means the dogs can select their milk carton 'toys' easily and it looks a bit tatty.
I'd prefer not to buy a special bin if possible, but others might appreciate a recommendation.

Does anyone have a good system or suggestion on domestic waste stream separation?

What works for you? What do you think might be good features to include in a home recycling area?

Following, hoping to make things better at our place too.

Here the garbage collection has three collection bins; one for "household waste", one for all packaging material (including paper since begin this year) and one for glass.
In our kitchen we have a big pedal bin for household trash, one 'recycle bin' for said packaging material and a compost bin.
Glass goes straight into the bin outside, it's not so much.
Compostables go to the compost heap where chicken gladly turn it.

In the long run it's our ambition to detach ourselves completely from the communal waste service (it's very expensive and I find the company quite arrogant) as we - hopefully - become more self-sufficient.

But yes, I've got my eyes peeled for suggestions for neat(er) rubbish organisation systems. Thank you, Nancy, for starting this thread!

This thread shows some systems that other folks use.

Where I live we have no trash service so I found that thread to be informative.

The same system could be used for none burnables or other items that need to be sorted.

https://permies.com/wiki/119012/pep-nest/Set-system-collecting-burnables-PEP

Nancy Reading wrote: What works for you? What do you think might be good features to include in a home recycling area?

We've been trying to make a habit of taking all the trash & recyclables to their outside bins every night before we lock up the house.
Compostables go in the worm bin, in the compost, or to the chickens, depending on what it is & how far I feel like walking.
Everything else gets rinsed & put on the edge of the counter to dry so one of us can sweep it into a bag or basket at the end of the night, and just toss it into the correct bin outside. If we cooked a lot and have a BUNCH of cans, or just went shopping, I might take care of it right away.

After several instances with fruit flies making a home in well-intentioned recycling bins, and 'forgetting' to take the recycling out on the correct day so it piles way up, my wife and I agreed it was actually easier to make clearing the house of trash a nightly routine.
We already go outside in the evening to secure the chickens in their henhouse, rain or shine, so we may as well use that trip to remove unwanted stuff from the house, too. Adds like 20 seconds to the trip, and there's rarely enough buildup in one day to make it a multi-trip ordeal.

Now if only I could get myself to be so diligent about doing laundry.... *sigh

Toko Aakster wrote:We've been trying to make a habit of taking all the trash & recyclables to their outside bins every night before we lock up the house.

I'm going to give you an apple for this! Really why have two bins when I already have them outside? I may well try and do this too - it will make extra space for me in the kitchen!

I have an imperfect and sometimes ugly-looking system for all types of "trash"!
1. Any natural products (hair, paper, wax etc.) are mixed into a long-term compost bin OR are burned depending on whether it's dry season (compost) or winter season (burn).
2. I've been using the mail-in envelopes from Ridwell to handle thin plastic films and layered plastic films, though I try to reuse the bags when I can. Sometimes the films just go into the trash bag.
3. Food scraps are composted.
4. Layered paper with plastics/coatings/etc is put into the recycling bin, I have an old kitty litter bucket for this. Loose (not bagged) recycling is easier to separate (so I've heard).
5. Metal pieces (random metal cut-offs, rusted screws, foils) are collected and brought to the scrap metal recycler/given to someone who wants to take it in for cash.
6. Our county takes food cans in the recycling bin, I put them in the same kitty litter bucket as before and then pour it outside in the curb can.
7. Aluminum cans are given away at the curb for anyone wanting the 10 cent per can recycling money (we're in suburban Oregon).
8. Glass is reused as much as possible and our recycler takes the rest in a small bin outside.
9. Any specialty items (batteries, lightbulbs with mercury, electronics etc) are taken to the local dump recycling area for those categories.
10.  Leftover bits considered "true" trash are put in the trash collection curb bin. I've been using paper grocery bags for awhile as small trash bags because I hate the idea of buying more plastic garbage bags just to throw them away. My thought is that paper will degrade eventually (theoretically).

My setup is a mixture of kitty litter buckets, paper bags on the floor, big yogurt tubs (metal bits) and old bowls/buckets (compost/burn).

Writing all of this out I am realizing this is easy to manage now but is definitely more to keep track of!

My local government provides a weekly service for both trash and recyclables. The trash is picked up via a sticker system where certain size bags/bins require a certain amount of pre-purchased stickers from the village office. The recyclables are 'single stream' meaning all recyclables can be put together in one bin and are do not require any stickers to be picked up. I should clarify that it truly isn't single stream because they ask for the carboard to be separated BUT they would accept them if mixed into the bin. I think it just helps with the handling.

My house has two trash bins, we usually only utilize one but every once and a while we may get a surge of trash (holidays) that would be stored in the bins until it could be picked up. We have a third can for just recyclables that sits in our mud room. As we gain recyclables, we put them into the can.

We do not have a municipal composting service so I compost everything I possibly can on the property. Food scraps, paper, cardboard, coffee grounds and more. My compost has at least halved my pre-compost garbage stream volume. I have reached the point that I need to get my recyclables picked up twice as frequent as my garbage which is promising.

I know that I still have room to improve my household diversion to compost but I believe I need to improve my compost setup to really do that.

Wow! I am realizing how lucky we are in terms of recyclable pickup here!

I separate our waste into 4 streams:
-kitchen waste that rabbits or dogs can eat
-organic/kitchen waste that can be bokashi composted
-recyclables that the city collects (glass, metals, paper and any plastic with a recycling number on it)
-true trash (anything else)
(we also have a service to dispose of toxic stuff like electronics and paint, where the city has a truck that has a schedule, you go there and dispose of your things where the truck is parked that week).

Trash pickup is 3 nights a week (!) and recycling 2. I generally put out a smallish bag of trash once a week and a big dog-food-sack type bag of recyclables every other week.

Our sewage treatment system is not made to support more than a single sheet of toilet paper, and that makes up a good portion of most people's domestic trash.
The remainder is non-recyclable plastic bag packaging (I buy most of our food in prepackaged bulk quantities, although I can use reusable bags for produce. I use these non-recyclable plastic bags for everything I can, like dog poop, but there are still so many).
I also have a large dog that can poop like nobody's business, and I haven't set up a good disposal system yet (into the sewage line would be ideal, but would also entail major construction. Bringing it into the house to flush is a non-starter.).

Recyclables I store outside on our porch for the two weeks or so it takes to accumulate enough to put out for collection. They go out every night before bed.
The rabbit stuff is accumulated during the day and served when I feed early in the morning. This stuff is usually veg/fruit peelings or stale bread- nothing that will get rotten or attract bugs (which would instead go in the compost).

Bokashi compost material is kept in a tightly-lidded compost bin on my countertop and emptied whenever it's full (usually every or every other day).
And the trash, since it is collected from a specific platform connected my front gate that street dogs can't access, can go out whenever I please. But in practice, I go around on the house on a trash night and gather trash from the bathroom and kitchen cans, add the dog poop bags that are outside, and put it all out right befor the trash truck comes.
My house and kitchen are tiny and I really don't have space for multiple containers or bins.

I got sick of cleaning out the recycling container in our kitchen so I replaced it with a cardboard box.  All our mixed recycling goes in there until time for collection and when the box gets too gross, it can simply go in the household waste.  I think I need to do the same for our indoor kitchen bin too--life's too short to be cleaning bins.

I never really thought about it.  Rubbish has to be organized here since before we moved here in the 1980s.  I don't think about it much anymore as about 90 to 95% of household waste is easily recyclable.  They call garbage disposal fees the laziness fee here.

Blue bin is for road side recycling.   It used to be one bin per type like plastic, tins, glass.  All gets washed before going in the bin.  And bins live on the north side of the house, in the shade, close enough to be easy to take to the road, far enough out of sight it's not ugly. Some people build wooden sheds for their bins.  Paper and card goes in paper grocery bags and stays inside until recycling day.  Corrigated cardboard varies depending on what system the cty is trying this decade.  Right now it's to cut or rip it into smaller than two foot square, then stack in a box for roadside pickup.  Or keep whole and take to the recycling dropoff center and watch them crush in a big machine.

Since everything needs to be clean for best recycling anyway, rodents and pests aren't an issue for outside recycling storage.

When the recycling of the city matures, they can do most of the sorting for us by machine so we are at a stage where we only need a bin each for paper, glass, and all the rest.


Some things still need to be taken to the recycling center due to toxicity, like lightbulbs, batteries, oil containers, paint tins, or due to difficulty containing litter like soft plastics.  But drop off is free and it's kind of fun seeing how recycling happens.

About the only thing left in the garbage is mixed materials and some plastics.  

We divide and conquer. Oh so many bins (1) we compost most food waste in a pallet compost bin outside on side of the house (2) paper recycling in a large reusable white bag (3) metal and plastic recycling in another large white bag (4) glass recycling goes in sturdy cardboard box (5) plastic films, bags to go back to the store (thanks NY) goes in a metal trash bin and (6) then there is the freezer garbage - any food items that we don't want to compost / ie smelly stuff goes in an old wax food container that cannot be recycled (7) humanure / separate compost bin situated far from house - not due to any odor, just the local bear likes to push it over occasionally.  ( one large paper bag that collects any other garbage - ie vacuum contents, stickers, old rags etc. which takes us about 6 months to fill.  Best part about our system is that I only need to go to the dump about 2-3 times a year to recycle and don't have to pay anyone to take away our trash. The white bags store under the stair to the loft and blend in with the white wall so it looks clean. We wash all our recycling so it can never smell or attract ants. I drive by the bins that line the streets and get spread all over the woods by animals and I'm so confused.