Trash Out Containers

[Northern-Lights]

I have been to a cache behind Northern Lights and found their signature container. It very easily drew my attention and I would have used it if I was short on bags, but since I had 6 or 7 with me I left it for the next person. I liked the "refill and replace" concept. The label on the outside definitely helps to draw attention. I looked inside and wondered about the amount of patience that might be required to roll a trash bag up tight enough to fit into that little space.. However, maybe it isn't all that hard. Some things look worse than they really are until you try them. If nothing else, it would provide caching related activities that could be done on days like this past Sunday when being out in the woods wouldn't have been a good idea, at least in our area. A lot of trees were weakened by the ice storm last month, and many of them were yielding to the high winds.(/QUOTE]

 

Wow...just looking at through this thread and saw our name mentioned...thanks for positive comments about our Trash Out cansiter. It's actually a time consuming project putting a 13 gallon kitchen trash bag into a film canister. However, you hit it on the head when you said it does provide something to do on cold rainy days. We also got an e-mail from a fello cacher that is now finding our containers and putting a dollar coin in the canister.....kind of like a finders prize if the finder used the trash bag!! I thought that was really neat.

 

If God is your co-pilot, it's time to change seats!!!

 

http://www.mi-geocaching.org/

[+malak]

quote:

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Originally posted by Thompson Family:

I'm just making up a bunch of 35mm film canisters with grocery bags stuffed into them.

 

I made up a label for them, please feel free to use it:

http://www.otherother.com/~bruce/CITO.jpg

 

The original is in an OpenOffice drawing, repeated across and down the page to fill it up. I'd be happy to email it to anyone who uses OpenOffice.

 

What I'm doing is cutting out the label (it's exactly an inch tall, 3 7/8" wide the exact width of a film canister. I take 2 inch packing tape and place the label on it with about 1/4" clearance on each side then wrap that around the canister. They look great!

 

Cheers,

Bruce.

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I've taken the .jpg and pasted it 16 times into a word document. So far I've made about 100 cannisters, have released about 4 in caches I've found, another in a cache I set, and even 12 in a CITO cache I set just this week (Iced Tea 29 in the Montreal, Qc, Can area). I also am carrying them around for all my caching and will throw in one or two per cache.

[+WildcatRegi]

Terrific idea!

 

hmmmm, I wonder how hard/expensive it would be to make pre-printed trash bags with Geocaching logo on it? .... "This trash was collected by a member of Geocaching.com - helping to keep the outdoors clean!"

 

nice PR

 

 

"The hardest thing to find is something that's not there!"

[+fly46]

quote:

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Originally posted by MuzzleBlast!:

Terrific idea!

 

hmmmm, I wonder how hard/expensive it would be to make pre-printed trash bags with Geocaching logo on it? .... "This trash was collected by a member of Geocaching.com - helping to keep the outdoors clean!"

 

nice PR

 

 

"The hardest thing to find is something that's not there!"

---

 

lol.. that would almost be worth looking into... But I like the idea of recycling the plastic walmart bags and the film canisters... that way, it's just about free for us because we're reusing crap that we'd otherwise throw away... and not only that... we're saving on creating extra trash.

[+Dreamer of Pictures]

Here's how I have been creating CITO drop-ins for geocaches.

 

CONTAINERS. I've been shooting 35mm film for 28 years, and for ages I kept the film cans on hand as containers, for my kids' craft projects, etc. A year or so back, a science teacher wanted to build rockets with them, and took my entire inventory of plastic film cans, maybe 40 film cans. I still have a few of the metal cans from the 60s.

 

Now I shoot digital, and so does my family, so we do not buy film anymore. I went to my favorite photo store, which includes a 1-hour minilab for developing film (this is critical; labs get film cans from customers), and they remembered my face. I asked for empty film cans. They said, "one trash bag or two?". They were DELIGHTED to find some way to get rid of these things.

 

I took one trash bag. It contained about 200 film cans. Of those, maybe 75 were translucent, and the remainder were gray or black.

 

I use the translucent ones as CITO drop-ins, with exterior labels to explain their purpose. I may end up using a few of the black or gray ones for microcaches. Otherwise we have inventory for crafts, rockets, or for sale. Wanna buy some?

 

LABELS. Labeling is simple if you use MS Word and shop at Staples or CompUSA or the like. Buy any Avery Dennison brand inkjet or laser mailing labels. I buy the 4" wide by 1" deep variety, arranged 2 across (known generically as "2 up")by 10 deep on an 8.5x11 sheet. It turns out that a 4" label will wrap around a 35mm film can very nicely. To print your favorite label text and graphics, keep the box of labels with you; it has an Avery Dennsion 4-digit product number that you will need to know.

 

Here's how to print the labels using MS Word 97. The Tools menu has an envelops and labels option. Choose that option, which causes a window to open. In that new window, click on the Labels tab. Click on the label portrayed in the lower right corner of the window. This click causes a Label Options window to open, including a menu of product numbers. Scroll to the Avery Dennison 4-digit product number that matches what you bought, and select that item from the menu. Click on the OK button in the upper right corner of the Label Options window, which closes the window, and returns you to the Labels tab.

 

Click on the New Document button in the upper right corner of the Labels tab. This causes Word to create a new document containing a table laid out to fit the 8.5x11 sheet of labels. You can fit your label into one 1"x4" cell, and then copy it to all the other 1"x4" cells in the table. Save your document, and you are ready to print.

 

I like the travel bug idea, but I have distributed over 20 of these CITO bottles into caches so far, and I have another 20 ready to be used. I cannot afford to spend the $6.50 per bottle to make each a travel bug.

 

BAGS. Most small thin-guage plastic shopping bags will compress very nicely into a film can. Additionally we receive our daily newspaper inside a plastic bag each day, and that bag type also compresses nicely into a film can. No magic or jujitsu involved in compression. Put a few vertical folds in the bag, so that it is long and thin, with the open end of the bag at one end. Squeeze the air out by rolling from the bottom to the open end. At that point the rolled-up bag is barely larger than the film can, and can be crammed in using fingers without difficulty.

 

If it is difficult, then the bag is too big or its plastic is too thick.

 

Dreamer of Pictures

[+mortaine]

You don't have to have bags specially printed up.

 

Just make an extra page of labels and slap one onto the bag you use yourself.

[+Rainbirds + TBD]

The Rainbirds + TBD

TBD says why not use the container and blue bags her owners use to pick up her waste.They are quite small and look like what they are to be used for.

[+mortaine]

Yeah, I was thinking about getting an extra bagholder (I've got the little roll container style, similar I think, to TBD's) and just zip-tying it to my GPSr lanyard.