As we Americans make our way through the world's resources at a rate six times that of the average human, we leave behind a lot of debris. Designers occasionally try to deal with this stuff, but by and large, trash gets left out of the design equation, leaving households with no way to handle the growing variety of recycling chores demanded by a changing world. The single trash can under the kitchen counter doesn't cut it anymore. Yet the other extreme — the overly specific, custom-built recycling sorting system that becomes obsolete when there is a change in the recycling market, the trash-removal contractor, or the household's makeup or habits — doesn't work so well either. It makes more
