I don’t know about your house, but at mine, the recycling corner is an out-of-control cluster of brown paper bags stuffed to overflowing with paper, cans and yogurt and other food containers with the remnants of their contents still clinging to the sides. Occasionally, there’s a ball of tin foil to add a little sparkle to the whole mess. It piles up in the corner behind the pantry door until our saintly housekeeper, Mirna, hauls it all to the recycling bins in the backyard and the process of piling up begins all over again. Every time I eye the crap heap, I think, there’s got to be a better solution. My former roommates had plastic bins, but inevitably, spills and such collected and turned into layers of dark black gunk that attracted cat hair, crumbs and other detritus. Equally disgusting and not disposable, therefore requiring cleaning. So yesterday, I was leafing through the latest issue of Dwell and saw the Ecopod — a contraption (oh how I love contraptions!) made by BMW labs that is like a free-standing trash compactor for recyclables. As I am with most kitchen gadgets, I was immediately intrigued. Take a look:
My question is, where does paper go? The site did not adequately answer that question. For my Diet Coke-obsessed roommate alone, however, this would be fabulous. Can’t you just see us all fighting over who gets to press the foot pedal to crush the cans and bottles?
On a related note, I was looking online for the ecopod website and in error clicked on another site selling a different kind of ecopod. This one is not for paper, cans and bottles. It’s for people. It’s the 100% biodegradable paper coffin. When I read the copy on Google, I thought they were talking about the first ecopod as a “coffin” for paper — like a recycler where your paper goes to die? But no. It wasn’t. Anyway, it’s not everyday that someone innovates on the coffin. Friends, I present, the OTHER ecopod:
As you can see, slightly different.
