On the list of questions I never thought I’d be asking, "why are trash cans so expensive?" is probably near the top of the list right next to “where did all of the forks go?” and “why are so many landlords total psychos?” 
I’m not talking about the kinds of trash cans you can buy at Target, or even on Amazon. Consumer-grade trash cans on the scale of nice looking and reasonably priced are pretty easy to find.
**But when you start looking at a trash can that doesn’t fill up 2-3 times a day when it’s shared by 100+ people…your options start to shrink. **
And really, it’s not that there aren’t options…it that with trash cans over 20 gallons everything is either bizarrely expensive, ugly as sin, *or both. *
Every option I found that was even slightly attractive came in at $700+ and I just couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t bring myself to drop that much money on a SINGLE TRASH CAN. It’s not like the can took the trash out, or put a new bag in itself…sheesh.
So we settled on trash can enclosures to cover large construction cans like the ones you can find at home depot…but the enclosures always took up a lot of space, got dirty (nothing quite like scrubbing out a trash enclosure).
After a couple of years of on-again-off-again research, I finally found a few kinda-nice-looking can options and shared the latest findings with our community. While discussing the options, one member shared a link she found (I still don’t know how she found them before me) for these: http://kolorcans.com
Some of the colors were pretty ugly, but there were a few decent ones and the physcial design was rather nice looking for a workspace.
But most importantly, their BIGGEST options (55 gallons!!) came in around $250…literally a third what I’d found for 32 gallon (or smaller!) cans.
With that said, 55 gallons is much bigger than we needed for daily use. 32 gallons is really plenty for us and only needs to be emptied once at the end of the day. We ended up going with this option in “dark granite.”
Before completing an order direct through kolorcans.com, we found this website (yes, trashcans unlimited is a real website) that sells the same Kolorcans product but allows you to mix and match colors between the base and the lid, which allowed us to get one of the two cans with a blue lid to indicate recycling. Boom!
Two cans, with two different color of lids, with 32 gallon liner bins each, came to under $500 including shipping. Which is still 30% less than a single trash can from nearly any other vendor I found!
So that’s my nearly 400 words missive on the terribleness that is the trashcan industry, and a great option for ~$200 each that only took me 5 years to find. May you all confidently upgrade your trash cans…as I know you’ve been wanting to.
-Alex
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