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Buying Guide to Kitchen Recycling Bins

Whatever your recycling needs, our great selection of built-in and freestanding kitchen bins have been carefully selected to ensure they are the highest quality and will help you recycle efficiently and with a degree of style.

A recycling bin from us will give you a place to sort your recycling and hide it, until it's time to take it to the wheelie bins. Either discreetly built in to a cupboard or standing looking smart in your kitchen, our bins will make the task easier and tidier for you. Choose from our recycling bin options:

  1. Our freestanding recycling bins can fit two or three recycling compartments into the floor space of one waste bin
  2. Looking for more stylish workplace recycling bins for the home or office? Trust Binopolis to have well-designed products
  3. If you'd prefer to conceal your recycling, In-cupboard recycling bins are an effective solution
  4. There's an increasing need to separate food waste for recycling and we have a choice of ideas, both In-cupboard and freestanding.

Please read on for more information about these different options to help choose which is the best recycling bin for you.

Freestanding Recycling Bins

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With our innovative designs, a dual or triple recycling bin can often be fitted into the same floor space that used to be occupied by one rubbish bin, which will help you to keep the recycling and waste sorted and tidied away. How do you choose from such a large range?

Floor space and capacity

The starting point has to be the space you have and how much waste your bin is going to need to hold. This may depend on the size of your household, how much you tend to throw away or recycle or how often you want to empty it. Some customers choose the largest bin they can fit into their space: for example our Brabantia range is beautifully designed to fit great capacity bin containers into a neat, stylish bin unit. If you have a compact kitchen or a narrow space for your bin, we have smaller recycling bins and also slim single compartment bins to use alone or in sets, sometimes placed separately.

How many compartments?

The number of compartments you need may influence your choice, depending on your local recycling scheme and how much capacity you need for recyclables compared to waste. Bins with two inner bin containers make it easy to separate waste from recycling and can be used in conjunction with a food waste caddy. Triple compartment bins such as the Joseph Joseph Totem can ‘round up’ all types of waste and recycling into one neat unit.

Opening methods

Which way to open the bin works best for you? The main methods are by Touch or by using a foot pedal, each with its own advantages. 

Bins with Touch-opening lids have strong but sensitive lid catches needing a light touch to open, giving easy access to the containers inside, and are then closed with a light touch, These bins are great if you’d find it difficult to use a foot pedal, and in design terms Touch bins are neat and streamlined with no pedal mechanism to add to the overall depth of the unit.

Pedal bins give you great hands-free opening, and in many of our models the lid will stay open long enough for general use before closing slowly and softly for you. Some have a stay-open catch for longer tasks or liner changing.

We also have push-flap and lift-off lids which are particularly good for places where the bin is used frequently, and Sensor opening bins with infra-red technology where a wave of your hand will open the lid.

Style and quality

The third consideration is style, as bins can be beautiful! From sleek, minimal shapes, to fun retro designs such as the Wesco range, our bins are designed to be seen and make a positive addition to your space. We believe that the bin is an essential kitchen accessory and should be given as much visual and functional design consideration as other kitchen appliances and even furniture.

If you’re looking to make a style statement with your recycling bin, then add a beautiful design in your choice of colour from bold and bright to pastels and earthy tones. Alternatively chic, on trend finishes such as stainless steel, grey or stone can blend discreetly with the rest of your kitchen or office space. 

Quality of design and materials is vital and our bins have features that set them apart from cheaply made models. The difference made by top quality engineering shows: quiet soft-close lids, pedal mechanisms that are built for years of use and extra durable construction in superior colour finishes or fingerprint-proof coatings. One of our bins should work well and keep its good looks for years of use.

Solutions for workplace recycling bins

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If you’re looking for a discreet and stylish recycling solution for your workplace, our range features well designed bins for your daily recycling and waste, which won’t spoil the look of your interior. The rise in working from home, and increasing commercial recycling requirements have made it a challenge to integrate recycling provision into work spaces where the design and ambience of the interior need to be maintained.

We have supplied, for example, sets of sleek steel bins for an English vineyard in their brick-built tasting vaults, cream coloured retro-styled bins for a legal chambers in a heritage building, and many hidden in-cupboard bins for office tea stations and lunch areas.

If you need a smart recycling station for your office, combining two or three bins as a set is a good-looking way to achieve high capacity. Many of our bins can be neatly aligned in groups, using either a set of single compartment bins for extra large capacity, or putting two recycling bins together. You can use different colours or finishes to denote different bin contents, adding your own labelling.

Some of our more minimal bin designs are suitable for conference rooms and reception areas, including the Brabantia Bo Hi bins which look “more like pieces of furniture than bins”, according to one customer who used them in her meeting rooms. The opposite of being discreet with bins is to use them to make a statement and project your brand identity: Wesco coloured bins in particular have been used by customers to reflect their brand colours, or to stand out in situations where bins must be seen and used, such as in an Family Arts Centre where we supplied yellow bins essential to post-creative clear ups. 

We are really happy to help suggest products and ideas for recycling and waste bin solutions, if you have a business need or you’re designing a space. The bins can contribute visually to the space and also make recycling easier for everyone using them.

In-cupboard Recycling Bins

Integrated in-cupboard bins are a fantastic solution if you want to maintain a clutter-free kitchen or to free up some floor space. They can also be a very effective element when it comes to planning the workflow in a kitchen as they can be positioned where you prepare food or tidy up at the end of a meal to make your kitchen more ergonomic. 

Integrated bins can be planned in to a new kitchen or retro-fitted as a great hidden recycling solution in an existing kitchen. We sell only top-quality leading brands including Wesco, Vauth-Sagel, Eco, Hailo and Ninka. Strong and durable, they have smooth runners and solidly built frameworks. As with our free-standing bins, they should give you years of use and spare inner bins and parts are available for freshening up in years to come. 

Our integrated bins for pull-out doors often have soft-close runners and a cabinet-wide lid which is strong enough to act as an extra shelf, so by fitting one of our bins you can turn improve the function of the cabinet itself. The range is divided by outer door width and this is a starting point to find the right size bin: please then check the inner width, depth and height available inside the cabinet.

Our wide range of In-cupboard bins for hinged door cabinets is also divided by outer door width, but again this is just a starting point because most of these products are simply fixed to the cabinet base, meaning that you have some flexibility with positioning. All of our bins for Hinged door cabinets can be fitted into a wider cabinet, perhaps positioned to one side with a water filter or other storage on the other side. It can also be possible to fit two base-fixed bins side by side in a 600mm or wider cabinet. 

It can be possible to convert a hinged door cabinet for use with a bin for pull-out doors, by taking the door off the hinges, filling any holes in the back and ideally positioning the handle centrally.

If you have a cabinet which is a bespoke or unusual size, or if you have an in-frame style, there are ways to make these formats work: see our separate section in our Buying Guide to In-Cupboard Bins, which also sets out more detail on measuring and choosing the best bin for your cabinet and recycling needs.

Bins for food waste

Increasingly our local authorities are asking us to recycle our food waste which is great in principle, but not easy in practice to incorporate in good-looking and practical ways into your home recycling arrangements.

How can we deal effectively with the food waste every day in the kitchen, before taking it outside to the kerbside caddy or to the compost bin or heap if you’re lucky enough to have garden space? We can help with some neat solutions, incorporated into our in-cupboard or free-standing recycling bins, or accessed through the worktop in professional chef style. 

In-cupboard bins with Food waste compartments

If you’re aiming to hide your food waste in an In-cupboard recycling bin, look at our new range from Eco which has been designed to include a food waste caddy in every model: some have a purpose-designed caddy to hook over one of the larger bins and store at the top, and some incorporate an 8 litre container with lid. 

Other models which have small compartments suitable for use as food caddies include some 3 and 4 compartment models for pull-out door units from Hailo where the small containers already come with a lid, and we can also supply optional lids for the 8 litre containers used in Ninka and Wesco models: get in touch to ask about these.

Although we recommend that between 4 and 8 litres is an ideal capacity for food waste, so that you can use most compostable green liners and change them frequently, we also have some small bins which swing out with a hinged cabinet door, which have larger containers of between 15 and 20 litres and these can be used for larger amounts of food waste.

Food waste compartments in freestanding bins

The Totem bins from Joseph Joseph, and several of the Brabantia  freestanding recycling bins have food waste containers as integral elements of the bin design. 

Fit a worktop-integrated bin for food waste

The Wesco Ergo Master provides waste disposal on an even surface with your worktop, making it a great solution for dealing with food waste. Integrated into the worktop with a washable surround above an 11 litre removable bucket, topped with stylish steel lid, this is a practical and ergonomic way to deal with food waste at working height. It is highly regarded by cooks and chefs for keeping their work surfaces clear of debris.

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