Hiding the Recycle Bin

The SharePoint Recycle Bin is a very useful feature, but due to the lack of a separate permission structure, sometimes product owners want to hide it from their users.  This can be done in a variety of ways, but I've found that the simplest is to create a new master page (usually from a downloaded copy of the one you currently use on your site) and find the following tag:

<SharePoint:SPLinkButton runat="server" NavigateUrl="~site/layouts/recyclebin.aspx" id=idNavLinkRecycleBin" ...
(there's a lot more)

Simply add the Visible="False" attribute to the tag.  This will hide the Recycle Bin link on the Quick Launch and allow you to retrieve it at any time.  You won't need SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio -- you can do this with Notepad once you've downloaded the file -- and the whole thing, from when you download a copy to when you Publish/Approve the new master page, takes less than a minute.