Labeling Your Outdoor Garbage Carts

Sometimes you might find a need to label your garbage cart, e.g. if you own a multi-family rental property and your tenants can’t remember which cart belongs to them. They may try to use their creative skills to label their carts themselves but the carts might come out like below which is illegible and makes the cart itself look like garbage.

You can try using a stencil and spray painting or hand painting the numbers on the cart but stencils are expensive and the results are usually not good either. Notice the blotchy edges below.

An easier and better way is to print vinyl decals. You can buy a pack of 15 vinyl decal sheets for $7 on Amazon.

Use Google Docs to create a document with large address numbers on it. Print it on the vinyl decal sheets, ideally using a laser printer. Then, to reduce the possibility of the ink evaporating from the sun and increase waterproofness, spray a few coats of clear, glossy paint. Don’t spray thick coats at once since otherwise the clear paint will cause the ink to run. Just do multiple thin coats.

You can the just peel and stick the number on your garbage carts. In the picture below, my ink toner was low so the print results weren’t good. That went away after replacing the toner.