TRASH TALK
Trash Talk: A green dream: three-bin bathrooms
February 13, 2010
Ellen Moorhouse
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Hidden away in a small industrial mall near Etobicoke's Sherway Gardens is White Knight Kitchens Inc. A husband-and-wife building team – Michael Manning and Catherine Ann Marshall – hope this White Knight and owner Joe Taveres will help them slay some garbage problems.
Marshall and Manning recently created Greenbilt Homes. Their first joint project: A 3,300-square-foot infill house in Oakville, which they want to be energy efficient, have eco-friendly finishes and facilitate environmentally responsible habits, such as trash separation.
In fact, they want three trash bins in each bathroom, similar to what's increasingly common in kitchens, so that users, even guests, will know exactly where to put organics (used tissues, paper towels, and sanitary products in some jurisdictions), recyclables (shampoo and cleanser bottles, cardboard, reading material); and garbage (Q-Tips, dental floss, razors, etc.).
Manning, a renovator and homebuilder, has worked with Taveres for years, and the Greenbilt partners have come to his showroom and shop to figure out how best to build a durable kitchen garbage system and adapt it for bathroom use.
"Let's make it easy," says Marshall. "Then it won't be a stretch, and you'll get a lot more enthusiasm about it."
An economist by trade, Marshall is applying her number-crunching skills, sourcing the greenest products possible with the most environmental impact for the money, at the same time keeping the projected price at a level competitive with the market.
So the three of them – Manning and Marshall standing at a counter, Taveres sitting because of a sore back – ponder shop drawings. They bat around ideas on how to make the garbage and recycling units durable and how to incorporate them in the kitchen and three bathrooms.
They discuss what's already available. Two examples are in the showroom, both with plastic bins set in an under-counter pullout arrangement with metal guides, one of which is quite flimsy.
Then Manning and Taveres, whose company builds and installs two to three custom kitchens a week, come up with a solution: Invert a wide drawer box so that the bottom is at the top, and then cut holes in it where three bins – for garbage, recycling and organics – can sit, side by side. The surface provides room for labelling the bins, and the pullout unit would be concealed by drawer fronts.
The kitchen has ample cabinet room to accommodate such a unit. The master ensuite vanity also offers space for a similar inverted drawer.
The compact first-floor powder room, however, has a banjo-shaped vanity, so the pullout trash unit must fit a counter-depth of only 16 inches. Taveres's catalogues show lots of bin sizes, so no problem.
The second-floor bathroom has only a 36-inch vanity, but the pipes come out of the wall, not the floor, and Taveres suggests pullout bins in the vanity unit.
The house Marshall and Manning are building will have a red brick exterior, centre-hall plan and garages at the back. The house foundation is poured, and the next construction phase starts Feb. 23.
Trash Talk appears Saturdays in New in Homes & Condos. Send questions or comments to e_moorhouse@sympatico.ca.
Read previous Trash Talks
- Reuse in Kitchener on a very large scale
- Reusable bag a lesson in stewardship
- Signs of the times and what they mean
- Campaign targets takeout trash
- Consider coming clean in 2010
- Garbage collectors face seasonal rush
- Consider Goodwill during the season of goodwill
- Sweaters live on as hand puppets, funky arm warmers
- Garbage is a fact of life
- Things go greener (really) with Coke
- Dog biscuit maker's recycling issues in the bag
- Eco-paint container isn't that green
- Stewardship program to drive tire recycling
- Loft reno represents extreme recycling
- Hitting the dead mattress problem
- Modest proposals for Waste Reduction Week
- Battery recycling doesn't always make sense
- This PET's a big problem
- One woman's trash is another's treasure
- Learning to love the magic of worms
- Good for soil, bad for environment?
- Sorting through the blue box conundrum
- Contractors handle much of city's trash
- Josh Rachlis’ inconvenient habit
- Spent batteries pose heavy problem
- Durham's lean, clean recycling machine
- Garden centre encourages recycling
- Creative composting yields fruitful results
- City suffering green bin blues
- This junk's just waiting to become art
- Reducing, reusing and remembering
- How Toronto sorts out blue box mess
- Filmmaker goes natural after 'garbage' ventures
- Got the blue bin blues? Don't overstuff
- Where old computers go to die
- The not-so-green side of gardening waste
- Overcoming the blips of electronic waste
- Pet food, aluminum foil and another twist on caps
- Don't chuck it, use it
- Don't flip your lid over cap conundrum
- From milk cartons to toilet tissue
- Bin there? Hidden radio frequency tags know all
- The scoop on poop
- Answers for all those 'irritating garbage questions'
Toronto Star