I was watching this fairly suburban-looking, I’d argue high consumption household, generating lots of paper and plastic trash, out in the country in rural Ohio where they are allowed to burn ordinary household trash. While it seems like they got backed up on trash burning chores, I was struck by how much trash this girl was tossing into the fire.
I don’t get upset with throwing a little bit of plastic into a fire or burning it with the trash, especially common throw-away plastics like Number 1, 2 and 5 resins. While there is inevitably some plasticizers, colors, and chemicals that are toxic, most modern trash isn’t the toxic soup it once was in the 1970s and 1980s both due to government regulation and voluntary changes by the paper and plastics industry. It’s not say you should stand downwind of a burning barrel and breathe in the smoke, but it’s also not nuclear waste that is typically part of household trash.
When you burn your household trash, you are in many ways dependent on weather conditions. It really can’t be pouring rain, your burn barrel can’t be full of snow, or things too bone dry. Without weekly trash pick up or regular trash burns, things can, as the video notes really get backed up. I know over the years when I don’t get to the transfer station or have fires up in the woods, I can end up with multiple bags to burn, even after compacting the trash down and separating out things like cans, and sometimes paper and plasitc for recycling.
That said, there is an alternative to burning or hauling off all this trash – it’s to make a lot less of it. Some packaging in our modern world is inevitable, but the frugal shopper buys in bulk, gets raw ingredients and natural products that only come with their skin for composting. Plastics and paper recycling is fine, but I’m not convinced that it’s much better at all for the environment then burning it on the rural homestead. It does make an excellent fire starter, especially if you keep paper separated out and dry, and compost the organics. That said, some heavier plastics like old extremely boots, if you can’t reuse them probably are best disposed of through the urban landfill system or maybe the farm dump if you have a lot of land.
Also I’m not convinced that burn barrel is the best way to incinerate and dispose of packaging on the homestead or farm. It’s not to say I’m against burning, indeed it’s a powerful tool for waste disposal on small scale. But burn barrels smolder and stink, they encourage people to mix in wet organics with wet paper, maximize hazardous byproducts of poor combustion. Almost any kind of homemade incinerator would be better then a burn barrel, especially with forced air and accelerant like lighter fluid and uesd motor oil to get it started. Or even a fire pit with lots of wood scraps to get a roaring fire, to quickly break down the chemicals in the paper and plastic. Trash fires need not stink when burning ordinary packaging if done right.
I’m all for burning as a waste disposal solution on rural homesteads. I don’t see it as a great evil. But I think it’s best done after minimizing and composting wastes, keeping paper dry and reusing whatever is possible and only burning as a last resort. Not using a stinking, smoldering burn barrel as part of an essentially suburban consumption pattern, which otherwise would be replaced by weekly garbage pickup to a distant landfill.
And disappointed when they don’t work. I know everybody starts at the basics, and builds up from there. But I like shinny objects much too much.
I’ve just been trying to figure out how to link and use big modern C++ libraries using cmake and visual studio. When the truth is I should be mastering C code and automake and VIM. That’s what the work computers have on them, and it’s simpler, probably faster and more reliable.
But at the same time I don’t want to reinvent the wheel and I want to do useful and interesting projects for myself and not another boring hello world project. R is great, but I want to program a real language, namely C. Yet, I find myself incredibly frustrated with broken build environments.
