Yard Waste Collection or What to Do With Rubbermaid Trash Cans That Are Past Their Normal Life.

Being a homeowner with a variety of different trees in and around my yard, I have a twice yearly yard clean up to do.

The pictures in this Instructable contain the pickup and bagging of leaves and stems from my neighbour's Black Walnut tree. I bag them and take them off to the municipal yard composting site. The other leaves and yard waste goes into my compost bins. I use heavy duty plastic large garbage bags which I filled and emptied at the towns composting site. I think reusing the trash cans is better than them becoming garbage.

Here is a close up of the Walnut tree's leaf stems.

Two different Rubbermaid trash cans and some 42 x 48 inch extra strong garbage bags. The blue can has a capacity of 77 liters, the larger can is around 110 liters capacity.

The blue trash can originally had wheels on it but a crack developed near the wheels due to thin plastic and I decided to cut the base off and use it to hold up yard/leaf bags, when I was filling the bags.

The other cans had lost their lids, either to the wind or a raccoon's handy work.

Put the blue bottomless trash can into the garbage bag, then put the bag and bottomless trash can into the trash can with the bottom. The photo shows what it should look like.

Rake up the yard waste and leaves and put in the trash cans/ garbage bag, push the stuff down with a rake. As the bag gets fuller slightly lift up the blue trash can so you can add more yard waste/leaves. Keep doing this until the bag is full. Remove the blue can.

Then lay the trash can with the bag in it onto its side, grabbing the garbage in two places pull it out and stand the garbage bag upright. You then will notice that you have a garbage bag that still has a lot of room left in it. The garbage is now relatively self supporting, and you now can keep filling the bag.

Keep doing this until you run out of yard-waste to dispose of. My town does not allow plastic bags in its composting facility, so I just transported them there, emptied the bags and brought them back home again to be reused.

Note:

I would imagine that most composting facilities only allow the use of "Kraft paper" leaf bags to be left at composting sites

I had another one of the lidless trash cans so I turned it into a large "dustpan" style can with a piece of aluminum and some self-tapping screws. The picture is self explanatory.

Using it:

Lay the can on its side by the yard waste that you want to pick up, and rake it into the can.

When the can is full dump it into the trash can/garbage bag setup.