We live in a very hilly area. Many folks in my neighborhood, including myself, have garages on the basement level with kitchens upstairs. My friend has a recycling solution that I'm stealing (with her blessing). She has a ductwork chute with a hinged door like a laundry chute so she can deposit her recycling directly into the bin in her garage. We have to separate paper from cans & bottles, so I will still have my paper bin in the bottom of the broom closet.

We have 2 trash pullouts in our kitchen, 1 next to the cleanup sink & dishwasher, the other on the opposite side of the island near the refrigerator & prep sink. Each has two plastic trash cans; we use the front one for trash & the rear one for recycling. Compost materials get collected in a bowl or small bucket & removed from the kitchen.

I am pretty happy with what we've done. I am nutty about recycling:
-I have a pullout trash under my main sink.
-I have a little compost bin with a step on pedal to open it under my prep sink.
-And on the back side of our island, I have four tilt-outs. One for cans/bottles, one for mixed paper, one for newspaper, and one for dog food! It also has a shelf above the tilt out where I store paper bags to use in the recycling bins, and the newspaper bags, for the doggie "stuff!"

Here are 2 pictures of the island:

Closed bins:

Open bin:

HTH! Linda

Great ideas!

Thanks for the information (and pictures linda-z). I'll talk this over with our architect this afternoon.

I am building a house, and this is something I was really concerned about, too, when designing our kitchen.

I found some slide-out trash containers (at Home Depot) that each have two cans, one behind the other. I bought two of them and put them right next to each other so there are four containers in total. They are going in an undercab, and I'm having fronts made for what will appear to be doors but will hook to the front of the sliders and pull the cans out two at a time. I'm planning to designate one for trash, one for cans, one for glass and plastic, and one for paper/burnables. The only thing I haven't figured out yet is what to do with large cardboard. I may be able to keep it, flattened, inside my pantry.

I'm sorry I can't post a picture, but we're still building and don't actually have this installed yet. I posted a similar question, "How do you organize your recycling," on the organization forum, and got several responses if you want to check that out.

Good luck!

My kitchen is pretty short on space, so this was a challenge. What I ended up deciding upon is a trash compactor for regular trash, and a corner base cabinet with three revolving bins: one for paper recycling, one for container recycling, and one for perishable trash that shouldn't go into the compactor. It's not installed yet, but I think it will be a good use of that otherwise awkward corner space. It should look something like this:

{{!gwi}}