"I don't really understand why," says a puzzled Michael Eavis. "For some reason the Americans wanted to put one in as a sample of what we do." He's pondering the request he received from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland, Ohio, which wanted a memento of Glastonbury – the festival he founded and has overseen for 44 years – and asked not for some piece of memorabilia left behind by a grateful headliner, but for a dustbin.

And so – alongside John Lennon's guitar, Clarence Clemons's saxophone, Elvis's custom motorcycle and Joey Ramone's leather jacket – visitors to the museum will be able to see a painted oil drum, one of 15,000 or so that are placed round the site to collect the refuse discarded by the revellers – of whom there will be 177,000 this year.

To be fair, rubbish is quite a big part of Glastonbury. Each year, around 2,500 tonnes of the stuff is deposited by festival-goers, and it takes a volunteer crew of around 100 people to patrol the event and empty them.

Michael Eavis on Glastonbury's bins and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The decision to make the bins decorative as well as functional was made in 1983. "I suddenly thought," Eavis says, "all these bins are incredibly boring. So we decided to have a go at painting them." Nevertheless, he thinks a pyramid ("we've got lots of little ones") to represent the world's only pyramid stage would have been a more apt representation of the festival.

The man charged with the task of turning refuse disposal into art was Hank Kruger, a regular at Glastonbury since its early days, who'd been doing odd jobs round the site. "I started on my own," he says, "and over the years I've had various helpers. Now I've got a team of 10 – I couldn't do it without them – plus volunteers who come in from all over the world to help from the beginning of June."

Each year, Kruger says, between 11,000 and 12,000 bins are painted or repainted (they're only disposed of when they get too rusty to reuse). The numbers mean there isn't time to spend days planning contemplating each piece of art. "But I've always been able to work quite fast. And we bounce ideas off each other." He and his team have themed painting days, too, when all the bins they do will have a common element – one day butterflies, another day flowers. "But mainly it's just decoration. Because there are so many, we have to time ourselves."

If Eavis remains a little baffled by the request from Ohio – "it's a very strange point of contact, out of all the things we do" – then Kruger is delighted that it's him, not the Rolling Stones or U2 or Coldplay, that has been chosen to represent Glastonbury at the Hall of Fame. "I was absolutely chuffed, absolutely amzazed," he says, with a laugh. "I've left my mark, haven't I?"

• The Guardian is Glastonbury's media partner