organizing the recycling cycle

this household produces one half bag of garbage per week as well as four blue bins of recycling. as much of the recycling originates in the kitchen, there's a constant process of managing its movement from the kitchen to the bins that looks like this:
1) leave the item(s) on the counter. 2) carry the items from the counter to a space on the floor near the garage door. 3) pick up the items from the space near the garage door and sort them into the bins.

it's the first two steps that i'd like to address. first and probably most obviously, little piles of cardboard, cans, and plastic on a kitchen counter are not very attractive, in fact they're kind of messy. secondly, while it makes for great entertainment for the watchers to see someone pile in through the garage door and do a bit of a hop-and-a-step over the heap of bits and pieces, it's grumpy-making for the hopper and stepper!

you likely have solutions of your own for this, and to be really honest, i've not really thought about solutions - obvious or otherwise - but this morning i came across a product design that seems to take care of steps one and two very neatly.

online magazine yanko design is featuring an idea developed by designers guisset constance and cid grégor that i think has tremendous value for people deaing with a recycling issue like the one i descibed here. it's such an obvious solution, but then really good design often does take the obvious and encapsulate it in an object.

named "tri3", it takes a design that many of us already use for food storage or in our offices and applies it to a stacked sorting system that allows for the placement of three different elements of the recycling / garbage streams. my community has a two-stream recycling model in place so this design suits us well. the third section would work well for this autumn when my city moves to collecting household "green" waste.
so have a look.