Newspaper recycling slot at the base of a kitchen cabinet

Topic: 

In thinking about a Kitchen remodel, in a house which sits on top of a garage/basement where the recycling and garbage bins are, I thought it would be nice to have a chute in the Kitchen to drop stuff into the bins down below. But you don't want to waste a lot of space in the kitchen on those.

One idea is to put the chute under a regular cabinet/countertop. It would look like a large mail slot at the base of the cabinet, under the door (or behind the door so you have to open it up to see it.)

Push the newspaper into the slot, and it falls down the chute and into the basket. The chute can be very wide for no-jam.

I've seen some counters have a circular hole for cans and bottles to fall down to the basement for recycle, which would also be nice. Haven't seen one for the papers before though. Alas for ordinary trash, you need a big chute with a big access, which still may be worth it, but the bottle/can and newspaper chutes take up no valuable space. (Laundry chutes are of course popular but also take up enough space to be jam free.)

Comments

Screw that. What I want is something like that for the cat's litter box.

Step on a pedal, the bottom swings open, and WHOMP! it all drops into a bigass sealed bin on wheels. When it's full, wheel it out into the backyard, dig a big hole, and bury it.

A good plan is to have a can crusher on the wall next to the drop slot and learn to sqeeze the air out of plastic bottles before scewing on the lid for the recycler. This reduces the container size considerably. Glass containers and tin cans should be reused for holding contaminated oil or grease after cooking. How else can you use this oil? Perhaps you know someone with a modified car?

The newspaper slot could be reduced if you reassemble the daily and roll it and band it. You could pull these rubber bads off on trash day if your scavenger company requires. You will probably need a separate slot for crushed cardboard containers and glossy mags. I would add a paper shredder for the 8.5" x 11" mail and office refuse paper. This shred can be used as packing material, scarecrow stuffing, or garden mulch.

The garden would also benefit from your plate scrapings and moldy leftovers. Some people just use a slop jar under the sink, emptied daily, but why not dream big and add a small compost box with earthworms in it and let them do some of the work.

If you make the newspaper chute large enough to avoid a jam, then you make it large enough for the paper to fold over, and possibly fall apart, between the chute entrance and the basket below, unless the basket practically connects with the chute -- and I've never seen a laundry chute that does that. Furthermore, if the newspaper has to free-fall longer than, say, two feet, you're going to have a newspaper mess all around the basket, which at recycle time is going to mean about as much work as if you didn't have the chute at all. :-(

Well, around here we just get a wheeled cart you can pretty much dump newspaper into in any state of disarray. If you have to carefully stack your papers, then this "kick under the counter" system would not
work particularly well.

But in fact, you could have the "green box" mounted in a slot just under the floor and get the papers into it in a pretty neat form. You would have to reach up in the basement to pull the box out of the slot and take the papers to the curb.

Different cities have different programs. Many cities have found that no matter how strict the rules, you still can't pass consumer sorted stuff directly into the recyclers, so they gave up having the consumer do much at all. In Sunnyvale, they used to have us sort cans from plastic, now it's one big mishmash. The only thing they put rules on now is cardboard, which must be small and folded flat. Other cities vary of course.

My main goal here was to find a way to have the recycling units take almost no cubic feet of kitchen space, and still be convienent.

Add new comment