A few years back I was driving in the upcountry outside of Otisco Lake in south western Onondaga County, and you could see the bloom of smoke – mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide – rising up from the garbage incinerator in Rock Cut south of Syracuse, burning all manors of things from office paper and food wrappers to smashed up television sets, sofa beds and discarded computers. With a variety of scrubbers and careful temperature control, it’s said to be quite clean if you ignore the plume rising up into the sky.
At times at home, I look at the colorful wrappers, the shinny finishes, the aluminimized packaging designed to both showcase the product (buy me!! at the store), and product the contents of the product. I am well read up on dangers of backyard trash burning, the dioxins and furans, the arsenic, lead and cadium that even just burning common packaging releases into the air and ground, both from original components in the packaging and how the long-chains of chemicals when heated or burned in completely. Yet, I burn most of my garbage. Have for years, despite the law up in wilderness. For the most part, those wrappers get put into the the big white plastic garbage in kitchen, tossed in the back of my truck, taken up to th woods, I pour lighter fluid and sticks on the top, and I quickly have a hot campfire burning, all that plastic rapidly oxidizing and getting the fuel wood soon enough into a good roaring fire.
It’s not to say I don’t sometimes keep out a plastic bottle or some other packaging to watch burn seperately. It is kind of fun sometimes to actually watch as a specific piece of trash goes up into smoke. Notice the properties of smoke, the way it melts and collapses on itself, how it blackens and bursts into flames and breaks down to nothing. Garbage sacks, packed full of weeks of discarded packaging and broken stuff are reduced down to a bit of metal foil, metal debris and other unburnable shit, which I carefully clean out in the morning. Occasionally, a bit of plastic makes it to the morning, and acrid smell strings my nose until I can snuff it out and save it for the next roaring fire – but normally when I burn – most trash quickly breaks down with minimal smell or odor but I rip roaring fire. It’s not like a smoldering burn barrel when I sned my trash up into the landfill in the sky.
But what about the chemicals I’m leaching out into the earth and into the sky? Those invisible toxins I can’t see but are very much still there. On the other hand, man has already made the pollution, burning it gets rid of it, turning it into carbon dioxide and other compounds which to a certain extent is reassorbed back into nature. I do pick up litter and always leave fire pits cleaner then when I found them. And I am not contributing nearly as much to that mighty mound in the Pine Bush. Instead, I’m just sending it up into smoke, creating a mighty nice fire in the process.
