Jeff and Liz Helfrich


Convincing people to recycle is hard. You can see it in the numbers. Despite the fact that 90 percent of Americans have access to recycling programs, less than 30 percent of plastic bottles are recycled. How can we make recycling easier? That’s what we asked after pulling recyclables out of our bathroom trashcan for what seemed like the millionth time. We hated taking the extra time to walk recyclables from the bathroom to our main recycling bin in the kitchen, but when we tried to make a pile of plastic shampoo and lotion bottles, toilet paper tubes, and castoff cardboard packaging outside the bathroom door, it wasn’t working. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that none of the recyclables were going in the trashcan just because it was easier.

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