The Frugal Woodworker’s Journal – Recycling the Easy Way

If you have tried recycling and found it to be a messy unpleasant chore, perhaps a simple device I’ve designed can help make the task a bit easier and cleaner. It will also create a “storage smart” collection site for your garage during the interval between collection dates.

Using recycled wood (of course) this storage stand is designed to use standard paper grocery bags as the main method of separating the several items most communities accept for recycling. These are metal cans, glass bottles, plastic bottles and newsprint. Each paper bag, which measures 17 inches in height, has an opening size of 12 inches by 7 inches. Three of them fit inside a community provided plastic recycling bin, which sits atop the stand. There is also room beneath the recycle bin to place either two more paper bags which hold newspapers or magazines, or this entire area can be used to corral a collection of flattened cardboard boxes.

This unit thus provides a separate place for each item you will normally recycle and makes placing it in an assigned place an easier daily task. Then, when it is time for your curbside pickup, you can slip a two-wheeled hand truck under the entire stand and move it effortlessly to the curbside pickup area.

Should your community not furnish a recycle container, you may simply buy one that will hold three of the paper grocery sacks specified above from any local source.

Since the size of the paper bags are so critical to the design of this recycle aid, you might be interested in how they actually dictated all the dimensions of the members used to build it.

I started with the base, which I decided should be a tray built of 1x4’s salvaged from discarded pallets and crate wood. This size material is both common to these items and there is more of it per item salvaged. The tray will require raised edges to contain the paper bags and a floor to support them. This tray will then be placed on a pair of cleats positioned wide enough apart to allow easy entrance of the floor plate of a lift truck.

The tray edges will use the full section of the 1x4’s and be cut to a length that will contain the filled paper bags snugly but with enough clearance to make the stand easy to use. Since the stand will have to be wide enough to allow the floor plate of your hand truck to easily fit under it we will position the paper bags side-by-side with their narrow ends facing each other. This means that we will need front and back tray edges that are twice the width of the paper bag plus a reasonable clearance of one-half inch. This produces an inside width of 24-1/2 inches and a depth of 7-1/2 inches. As the structure will be stronger if the shorter pieces, the sides, will be face nailed to the ends of the longer ones, we will have to increase their length by 1-1/2 inches, so we will make them 7-1/2 + 1-1/2, or 9 inches long.

The tray floor will need boards that are able to bridge the full width of the tray edges and will thus be 24-1/2 + 1-1/2 or 26 inches long. As a 1x4 board is actually 3-1/2 wide we will need three of them to yield a total tray floor front to back depth of 10-1/2 inches. This dimension will result in the floor extending beyond the front and back outside faces of the tray edges by the thickness of a 1x4 board, which actually is three-fourths of an inch. These extended ledges will provide bases for the vertical legs that will be used to support the weight of the recycle box, its contents, and the structure supporting it.

The length of the vertical legs are dictated by the height of the bag, 17 inches, plus the height of the base tray edge, 3-1/2 inch, plus a few inches for comfortable clearance when a full bag of newspapers is added to the stand. I settled on 2 inches for a reasonable clearance for my stand, thus making them a total of 22-1/2 inches long.

We will need to add a horizontal member to the top of the inside faces of both the front and rear legs to keep them in their proper positions. The length of these boards is established by the distance that you decide they should be spread apart. Since the recycle box will hold three paper bags, each of which is 7 inches wide when the paper bags are placed wide face to wide face, the base of the recycle box is a little over 21 inches wide. So, let’s make these members 20 inches and thus position the legs centrally over the lower tray.

We will then need another pair of boards to bridge the front and rear legs at each side of this support platform. Let’s make them rest atop the vertical legs to supply the greatest amount of strength available from this arrangement. They will thus be 10-1/2 long.

While the standard recycle box may overhang the top of the stand a bit, it will still have plenty of support and can easily be turned upside down to telescope over the top of the stand when empty.
This will anchor it to keep it from blowing away in a stiff wind and keep it dry when it is raining.

(1) Assembly is started by nailing the shorter of the four edge members of the tray base structure to the end faces of the longer pieces. You can use exterior glue if you wish, but it should not be required.

(2) The bottom pieces are then added by nailing through them into the edge members. Make sure that the two outside pieces extend beyond the outside faces of the edge members by the thickness of the 1x4’s you are using.

(3) A twenty-inch long horizontal member is nailed to the front vertical legs. Use care to keep
everything square. This same operation joins the rear vertical legs.

(4) Cleats are positioned and nailed to the bottom of the base tray structure to allow the hand truck base plate to easily enter when it is to be moved.

(5) The vertical leg sub-assemblies are located centrally to the front and rear faces of the tray assembly and nailed into place. NOTE: Support them by resting the inside faces of the tray edges against a solid surface when nailing the vertical legs in place.

(6) The top members are positioned and then nailed in place and the recycle box placed atop the
stand to complete the assembly.