Chore/Feat: Recycling Sorting/Collection Station ♻️

[nelsonic]

For the last 9 months, we’ve been collecting all our recycling in a single IKEA shopping bag. ♻️ When I did the recycling I would take the bag to the local recycling bins and do the sorting at the bin 🚮 …

Recently we assigned the task of taking the recycling to our cleaning lady. 🧚‍♀️ Sadly, despite my explaining to her that she can take the whole ikea bag with her and do the separation at the bins, she insists on doing the separation at our house and taking the recycling in two separate bags:

the problem with this is that she is incredibly slow at it. 🐌 Without any exaggeration, she takes ~30mins+ per week to do the separation; roughly 10mins each time 3 days a week. each time I see it it drives me nuts! 30mins/week = 2h/month = €13/month (€156/year!!) just on separating recycling. Again, mega slow! ⏳🐢

I don’t mind people being methodical in their work, but this isn’t “work”; it’s a job that shouldn’t exist! is just painful to watch so I’m doing something about it.

Todo

• [x] Design and Prototype the minimal system for collecting/sorting recycling in the space available.

[nelsonic]

If we have more people in the house the amount of recycling will increase proportionately 📈 so this could easily become an expensive (hugely time-wasting) daily activity.

I took the measurements of the cupboard where the recycling bag is stored and tried to sketch what is in my head:

[nelsonic]

With 30 mins of prototyping in the workshop + 2 mins on the laser this is what I came up with:

[nelsonic]

Pretty easy to modify for the second sorting area:

We now have two color-coded recycling bags for the two types of recycling bins:

this will allow the person doing the recycling to do the sorting and thus eliminate the BS Job of sorting. 👌

used scrap plywood from previous projects. So only cost me a few cents in screws in terms of materials. 💰

Now I will make it crystal clear to the cleaning lady that she will take the whole bag to the recycling bin and empty the whole bag at once. She will replace the removed bag with a spare IKEA shopping bag immediately and bring back the empty one the next time she comes to work. No more time-wasting sorting. 🎉

@iteles thoughts?

[nelsonic]

The idea behind this minimalist implementation is to make the whole bag as easy to remove as possible. Simply unhook the bag handles and slide the bag out. Then put in a new bag and take the full one to the recycling bin. Should take the task from 10 mins down to less than one minute. In the medium term with more people in the house it will rapidly start saving us money.

[iteles]

Love this. We used to have individual recycling bins which we couldn't fit into our new kitchen and I've been saying forever that it's ridiculous we don't separate at source (ie when something goes into the recycling first time round).

Looks awesome!

Looking forward to testing the ease of use of unhooking and pulling out the bags when the are heavy or overfilled for example too 👌🏻

[nelsonic]

@iteles the idea is that they will never be over-filled because they will be removed by DT (or someone else) at 80%. But if we find people regularly over-filling the bags (tragedy of the commons), 🙃 we can revisit the shelf height under the bags which is the limiter in terms of removing them. 💭