Why a 13 Gallon Bin Is Really a 16 Gallon Bucket

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Anywhere from about two pounds to about a hundred, and the reason the answer is that useless is that the only number anyone publishes about a bin is its volume, while the only thing you notice when you lift the bag is its mass. The conversion between them is bulk density, and bulk density is the one property of household waste that nobody measures and everybody changes by accident.

While working that out, something else fell out of the arithmetic. The 13 gallon figure that every kitchen bin in this category is sold on is not a measurement of a kitchen, a household or even a bucket. It is a bag, and we can prove it from the two figures one of our own products publishes about itself.

Our own sentence, and the one product that can test it

Our guide to choosing a step-on kitchen trash can that fits says, under the heading Match capacity to household size: Roughly 13 gallons suits most family kitchens. Our best kitchen trash cans roundup goes further and calls it a property of kitchens: Most kitchens land on 13 gallons as the sweet spot for daily household waste.

We carry exactly one 13 gallon step-on can, and it happens to be the only bin listing in our whole catalogue that publishes the inside of its own bucket. The Garvee 13 gallon step-on stainless steel kitchen trash can describes a removable polypropylene bucket measuring 15.75 by 10.24 by 23.03 inches, and separately gives a shell of 16.73 by 14.65 inches at 25.98 inches tall closed.

Multiply the bucket out. 15.75 times 10.24 times 23.03 is 3,714.3 cubic inches, and at 231 cubic inches to the US gallon that is 16.08 gallons. The can is rated 13. Three gallons of real bucket, a fifth of the whole thing, is not in the number.

Where the missing three gallons went, and what that tells you

It is not lost and it is not an exaggeration in the other direction. Work out where it is. Thirteen gallons is 3,003 cubic inches, and the bucket's base is 15.75 by 10.24, which is 161.28 square inches. Divide and the rated capacity is a column of waste 18.62 inches deep inside a bucket that is 23.03 inches deep.

So the 13 gallon line sits 4.41 inches below the bucket's rim. That is 19.1 percent of its depth, and it is a cuff. A liner has to reach the rim, fold back over it and grip on the outside, and the depth it needs to do that is exactly the depth the capacity figure leaves out. Read the two numbers together and the conclusion is forced: the 13 is measured downwards from the rim by a bag, not outwards from the walls by a bucket. Thirteen gallons is the standard tall kitchen liner, and the can is dimensioned around it. The figure on the bin is the figure on the bag box.

Which the worklist for this batch suspected and which is now arithmetic rather than suspicion. And it means the heading on our own page is the part that fails. Match capacity to household size is not what the number does. It matches the can to a liner format.

The record checks itself, which almost never happens

Here is the part that surprised me. The same listing offers a second, informal capacity: the bucket holds up to 32 large water bottles or 70 twelve-ounce cans, per the listing. That is normally marketing filler. Here it is a second measurement, and it can be tested against the first.

A US twelve-ounce beverage can is 2.60 inches across the body and 4.83 inches tall, so the cylinder it occupies is 25.64 cubic inches. Seventy of them occupy 1,795 cubic inches of that. Now compare that against the two candidate volumes. Against 3,003 cubic inches, which is 13 gallons, the cans fill 59.8 percent, and for loose cylinders dropped into a box rather than stacked by hand that is an entirely ordinary packing fraction. Against 3,714 cubic inches, which is the bucket's geometry, they fill 48.3 percent, which is far too loose for anything you tipped in.

So the maker's own throwaway figure independently agrees that 13 gallons is a fill level and not a box volume. Two published numbers from one record, pointing the same way. That is a better record than the category deserves, and our Garvee 13 gallon step-on can review has the pedal and hinge side of it.

One thing that is not a second opinion, though, is the metric figure. The listing calls it a 50 liter bin, and our touchless kitchen trash cans page says these cans sit around 13 gallons, or roughly 50 liters. Thirteen US gallons is 49.21 liters and 50 liters is 13.21 gallons. The metric number is a rounding of the imperial bag standard, so quoting both is quoting one figure twice.

Now the question that was actually asked, and why volume cannot answer it

A full bag's weight is volume times bulk density, and bulk density is where the whole thing comes apart. Take the maker's own seventy cans and do nothing to them but step on them.

Loose, they are 1,795 cubic inches of cylinder and they fill the bin. Flattened to three quarters of an inch, each one occupies 3.98 cubic inches, and seventy of those at the same 59.8 percent packing come to 466 cubic inches, which is 2.02 gallons. Flattened to half an inch, 1.35 gallons. The same waste, in the same bin, between 1.35 and 13 gallons depending on whether anyone bothered. That is a factor of 6.4 to 9.7, and it is larger than the gap between any two bins this site would have you choose between.

The mass range is wider still, and it answers the Quora question as honestly as it can be answered. Seventy empty aluminum cans at roughly fifteen grams each come to 1.05 kilograms, about two and a half pounds, and that is a bin genuinely full to the line. Fill the same 49.21 liters with water and it is 49.21 kilograms, about 108 pounds. A factor of 47 between the lightest and the heaviest thing a 13 gallon bin can be full of. Real kitchen waste sits somewhere between, closer to the light end than people expect because packaging is mostly air, and nothing we publish narrows it. Not one liner in our catalogue publishes a weight rating, which the page on why a 13 gallon bag does not fit a 13 gallon can already flags on the one contractor bag we carry that publishes everything else.

That page is also the right answer to the companion question people ask, which is why a 13 gallon bag seems smaller than a 13 gallon can. It is, and the reason is a perimeter rather than a volume, and it is worked out there properly. This page is the vertical half of the same object. We are not the only category where a stated capacity is a fill line rather than a box, either. Our commercial blenders page makes the same point in one line and makes it well: stated capacity often exceeds the safe fill line, so check the marked liquid maximum.

What our number does survive, and it is most of it

This is not a page about a wrong figure. Three of the four numbers our guide gives check out against the one 13 gallon can we carry, and the check is tighter than I expected.

Our guide says Slim bins near 16 inches wide slot into narrow gaps. The Garvee is 16.73 inches wide. Our guide warns that some cans rise above 35 inches when fully raised. The Garvee reaches 35.43 inches with the lid fully open, and lists that among its own drawbacks. And 13 gallons does genuinely fit inside a 16.73 by 14.65 inch footprint at a sensible height, which is the real design problem a tall kitchen bin solves: the bucket is 15.75 by 10.24 inches, so it is narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow, and it reaches 13 gallons by going up. Every one of those three is correct, and the 25.98 inch closed height is why it aligns under a 36 inch island counter.

So the verdict splits. As a statement about what a can has to be to take a standard liner, 13 gallons is exactly right and the rest of the page's geometry is right with it. As a statement about households, it is a liner format with a household's name on it. Worth adding that the same reverse engineering runs through this whole category: our page on small trash cans for every room says roughly 1.8 gallons suits bathrooms and bedrooms, and we carry 1.8 gallon bins; our page on car trash cans says around 3 gallons suits families and road trips, and we carry a 3 gallon car bin. The mechanism behind that habit is worked out in this batch's page on yoga mat thickness, so it is not re-argued here.

The constraint 13 gallons silently removes

One consequence of the figure that no page of ours mentions. Thirteen gallons is 52 quarts. The YJHome pull-out under-cabinet trash can frame is the only hidden-bin kit we carry that publishes the range of cans it takes, and it fits kitchen cans of 28 to 40 quart volume and needs a cabinet of at least 15 to 18 inches wide. Forty quarts is 10 gallons. So the capacity our guide recommends is 30 percent above the top of the only published cabinet range on the site, and recommending it quietly rules out putting the bin inside a cabinet at all.

That is a real fork and it deserves stating in the open: a 13 gallon bin is a standing object, roughly 26 inches tall and needing 35 inches of clearance overhead. If the point of the exercise was to get the bin out of the walkway, the capacity has already decided against you. The kit's own dimensions bear it out, at 11.1 inches wide, 16.9 deep and 13.6 tall, and our YJHome pull-out frame review covers the installation side, which its own record is blunt about. See also our guide to installing a pull-out under-cabinet trash can.

At the small end the same unit problem shows up inverted. The linseyCove foldable hanging under-sink bin comes in 6 and 11 liter sizes, which are 1.59 and 2.91 gallons: round in liters, ragged in gallons. The Garvee is round in gallons and ragged in liters. Which unit a container's capacity is round in tells you which market's standard it was dimensioned against, and it is the quickest tell there is. Our linseyCove hanging bin review is honest that even those two figures are maker stated.

Run the tell up the whole ladder and almost every round capacity in this category comes from a container that is not a bin. Thirteen gallons is the tall kitchen liner. The Tuopus 32 gallon outdoor trash can is 32 because 32 gallons is the long-standing curbside can. Fifty five is a steel drum. Ninety five and ninety six are municipal wheeled carts, and both of those appear on the bag page linked above. The numbers that are not round, like 1.8 and 2.3 and 2.6 and 2.38, are the ones that came from measuring an actual box. Our Tuopus 32 gallon outdoor bin review covers the lid latch, which matters more outdoors than the capacity does.

The honest limit, and the free technique

Two limits. The packing fraction of 59.8 percent is carried across from the loose cans to the flattened ones unchanged, and that is generous to the flattened case: flat discs tipped into a bucket actually stack better than cylinders, so the crushed volumes are if anything overstated and the factor of 9.7 is a floor rather than a ceiling. And the whole upper panel rests on one record. Every other bin we hold publishes a capacity with nothing to check it against, so this arithmetic cannot be repeated anywhere else in the category, which is itself the finding: one listing out of thirty publishes enough to be audited.

So the technique, and it needs nothing but the bin you own. Put the liner in, fill a jug with a known volume of water and pour it in until the water reaches where you actually stop filling, not the rim. That is your bin's real working capacity, and on the arithmetic above it will come in around four fifths of the figure on the box, because the cuff is not optional. Then do the thing that matters more. For one week, flatten every box and every bottle before it goes in. The volume arithmetic says that single habit is worth between six and nine times the capacity, which is more than any bin on this page could give you by being bigger, and it is the only lever in this whole subject that does not need a purchase.