Quarter Inch Hardware Cloth Trash Bin Basket Design Build With Tin Snips And Wire

The desert sand storms out here can blow just about anything that's not anchored down away. I call it drift trash, all kinds of random light materials blow through and past my property during storms. I've actually scored some very useful materials that way, who knows, maybe someday I'll get a message in a bottle. I've had to chase after many items of my own, or had to go search for them the day after a storm. Having learned enough lessons, I've started to over build and over anchor things. It's to a point now where it'd have to be quite apocalyptic for a storm to carry anything away. I've adapted strategies to anchor and weigh things so they stay in place. A lot of things are weight down by large rocks, some things are tied to buried anchors, some things are bundled together, etc. One strategy to keep trash and recyclable of my own in one place has been to use quarter inch hardware cloth to build light weight but sturdy enough trash baskets.

From a 3 or 4 foot wide roll of the hardware cloth mesh, I'd use tin snips to first cut about a 6 foot long piece, then make a cylinder with it, wire the ends together so it stays in place, then measure the base and cut another square to so that four points on the cylinder meet the edge of the square. This allows for the four corners of the square to be folded up like triangles onto the cylinder. I wire the corners up, then wire the other points of contact in a reasonably evenly distributed pattern and it's done. A simple trash/recycling/materials bin out of two cut pieces of hardware cloth and some wire. In more rainy climates, it would corrode after a while, but in the desert it will last much longer in the dry conditions. So far, they've made it through many storms and stood tall and steady.