When Victoria Soudavnaya and Stefan Strömbäck began designing Sortify just over a year ago, they wanted to create a product that could easily replace every city rubbish bin and make on-street recycling easier than ever.

It’s an admirable and long overdue goal, because, for some reason, on-street recycling has never quite become mainstream. Most cities are well equipped for waste disposal, with bins dotted along every street, but finding a recycling point for your newspaper or plastic bottle is a much harder task.

So why not replace every city rubbish bin with one capable of sorting waste for recycling, like the Sortify? Even though there is nothing groundbreaking about its design (it is basically an ordinary bin split into four sections), five cities in Sweden have already committed to the product and are confident their populations will take the time to separate their waste before disposing of it.

Considering the mass-adoption of residential recycling schemes, isn’t it time on-street recycling facilities caught up?