Recycle, Reduce, Reuse...And Stop Being Lazy

Our home is a bit chaotic at the moment.  We're in the midst of a renovation project, plus we have lots of normal house/work things going on and we haven't quite figured out how to manage all of them. One key part that's fallen to the wayside, to my regret, is our recycling.  It's shameful, really.  Instead of sorting and taking our recycling the one block walk to the transfer bins, I side with convenience (or laziness) and just toss it out in the garbage.  Horrible, I know.  At least the hubs is still doing his part to save our junk from the landfill, but his effort involves piling it on the counter or in a stack on the floor where it sits until he takes it out to the transfer bins which drives me crazy and makes me want to throw it away even more.  What's even worse, I know what happens to all that stuff that I throw in the garbage and it's awful that I still do it.  My conscience is reeling.

So in honor of good ol' Earth Day which was this past Monday, I'm getting back into the swing of things and saving the world one costco sized milk carton at a time.

We have three recycling storage bins, that we picked up at Ikea, but we haven't found a convenient place to store them.  I WISH we had some sort of setup like these pegboard storage systems in a closed off utility room so the mess was out of sight and it was organized and beautiful but that's just not in the cards.

{VIA}

Or this option, which we may be able to include in our mudroom plans.  I'd still like it a bit more hidden and condensed so perhaps we could build the laundry cabinet a little bit bigger to house the stackable bins.  Or ditch the built-in clothes hamper and make it a built-in recycling station instead. That's something to think about.

{VIA}

I think some brainstorming is definitely in order, but until we have a perfect system we'll just have to live with the imperfect one we have now.  My conscience just can't take the guilt of adding to the human footprint any longer.

So what recycling systems do you have in place?