Looking for a simple way to hang and store your kitchen waste bin? Sure, you could buy the $19 Amazon hook, or you could take 10 minutes and a 4.5″ piece of scrap wood and make your own.
This article is a bit niche in that not every municipality that this blog reaches, has a city program to compost food waste. London is actually well-behind other cities in the country, but have finally (as of January 15th, 2023) made a move for the better!
In October, 126,000 households received both a green bin and a kitchen waste bin, with curbside pickup to begin this week. That is SO AWESOME!
Granted, I love my LOMI and a good majority of my food waste goes directly into it for instant composting, but these new bins will accept wooden stir sticks, greasy pizza boxes, oils, grease, paper wrappers and other items that are a bit too large for my *LOMI to handle.
*Amazon affiliate link. For full affiliate disclosure, please see the bottom of the page.
The hope is that Londoners (and other participating cities all over the world) will be able to divert 45% of waste from landfills. That’s how much organic waste they (we, in London anyways) are currently sending to landfill unnecessarily.
Great, we’re all onboard right?
But where do you store your little kitchen waste bin? Perhaps I’m very lazy, but I know that I wouldn’t use it if I had to take plate scrapings out to the garage after every meal.
So I looked up hooks – and there was only one option available for the type of kitchen waste bins we have. A $19 CDN option.
Come on! It can’t be that difficult to come up with a solution for storing your bin conveniently and aesthetically so it’s not just sitting on your counter right?
It wasn’t.
Kitchen waste bin hanger
- piece of scrap wood 4 ¼” wide, 1 ¾” deep and 1 ¼” thick
- 2″ hole saw or jigsaw
- pocket screw jig
- 1 ¼” pocket screws
I used a 2″ hole saw to cut a 2/3 circle in a scrap piece of walnut
Next, cut your scrap wood so that it is ~1″ (2.5cm) from the edges of your hole. Your overall width will end up being about 4 ¼” (10.8cm).
I tried to fit the block behind the kitchen waste bin handle and found that it wasn’t rounded enough to tuck into the space. Easily fixed by cutting a 45° angle on either corner. This is pretty easily measured just by holding your block up to your bin and marking where the back of the bin has it’s cut out for the handle.
It’s likely that most of us will choose to hang our kitchen waste bins inside a cabinet door – which means you won’t want to screw through the door and ruin the outer face. Now Kreg will likely poo-poo this, but I drilled 1 ¼” pocket holes into the underside of my wood hanger.
Then attached it to my recycling cabinet with 1 ¼” pocket screws. Kreg does not recommend attaching 1 ¼” wood to ¾” or ½” wood because it won’t be very strong. Certainly strong enough to hold a plastic bin with a few leftovers inside, but not strong enough to endorse doing this on a regular basis. I can tell you though that this is PLENTY sturdy for what we need it for.
(I did a little “fancy” routing because I’ve become obsessed with my little trim router lately.)
The pocket screws are hidden underneath and drilled in from the hanger side, so if you are hanging on a cupboard door, they won’t be seen.
And how, you may ask, does this kitchen waste bin hanger work? You just drop the handle of your container into the hole.
Easy to build, easy to use, out-of-site and less than $1 in supplies.
I love how this turned out! Walnut was overkill, but I did have the scrap in the garage. You can leave it as-is, oil the wood, stain, paint to match your cabinetry, anything you want really.
I did make one mistake though – and it’s something for you to consider before deciding where to put your kitchen waste bin hanger – don’t hang it in direct sunlight like I did here. In Winter it’s fine, but in summer, the food waste will rot faster in direct heat and sunlight so it could develop a decent “stank” pretty quickly.
This unit is our family recycling centre (one of my first builds with plans from Ana White), so keeping my food waste bin near the LOMI, the paper recycling and the plastic recycling just made sense.
That’s it London (and most Canadian cities)! If you have a “kitchen catcher” with a carrying handle on the back, this is a simple solution to store it.
Have a great one!