Update: How to Haul Your Own Trash and Set Up a Small Recycling Center

by TFF, posted in Uncategorized, Zero Waste Home Challenge

Here’s an update to our post: Private Trash Removal is Expensive, Here’s How Frugal Homeowners Reduce the Cost. Even in a couple of days of seriously single-streaming our recycling, we have reduced the garbage in our cans. (For the list of what you can and cannot include in single stream, click here for this PDF.) We set up a quick recycling center in the garage with materials on hand and completed it with labels–all done in about 30 minutes.

Also, here are photos of my husband’s car packed to go to the dump! It’s not a pretty sight to many, but if it saves us hundreds of dollars a year, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder!

A Typical Dump Run on Saturday  Morning:

dump run
before
Here's the little sliver of a space in the garage that we wanted to turn into an organized recycling center. My husband built it years ago to keep us better organized. Hmmmm, didn't quite work. Before, it was packed with junk. But see what happened in 30 minutes of organization....
after
One shot of how we organized our little center. We tacked up labels on index cards so we can keep track of what goes where. The top red bin is for --ah, see, I already forgot!
labels
Here's our labeling system!
basket
Our label for the basket where we recycle our newspapers.
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