I will burn a lot of things that greenies don’t like but a tire would stink to high hell even in the wilderness. Don’t need to make excessive stink or black smoke or draw attention to myself for sure even if it is late at night. This was the tire who sidewall eventually burst when the cord failed and had to be replace after many months of wobble and all of the track wore off the tire. Got two years out of the tire, but the bike is used for commuting nearly all year around, and it’s 20 plus miles a day, depending how many side trips I make.
Soon enough that old bike tire will be crushed with the junk mail, aluminum cans, food scraps and general other garbage and hauled to the giant mound in Albany Pine Bush, as it reaches it’s final ascent after more then a half century of city garbage dumping, only slowed slightly in mid-1980s to the mid-1990s when the state had their burn plant in Sheridan Hollow. The one that dumped soot, heavy metals and all kinds of noxious chemicals over the colored and poor, unfortunate enough to live near the state’s steam plant that for a while burned shredded garbage – everything from old television sets and eight track players soldered with lead to moldy sandwiches and chicken bones – diverted from the landfill. But I wasn’t going to burn it.
I am more then a bit jealous of all the off-gridders, homesteaders and farmers who can honestly say they make a trip to the dump maybe once or twice a year. They don’t buy a lot of trash, and most of it that they do buy and use up – at least packaging wise – goes up in smoke. Having a burn barrel and land with nobody nearby, means you really are not dependent on urban trash services. Most packaging these days is paper or plastic, and burns up to basically nothing. I know – there have been many years – I’ve gone basically a year with only going to the transfer station once to get rid of cans and glass. Though I still accumulate a lot of broken, unburanble crap. But that’s true of homesteads everywhere.
Often I think about all the things I’ve sent up in smoke over the years. Both the beauty of the flames and the occasional noxious smell when there is incomplete combustion or something particularly noxious goes up into smoke. But it’s always so satisfying to look at those old garbage bags before, stuff full of packaging and other crap I never want to see before, and waking up he next morning, and being nothing left except a few random pieces of metal, glass, or ceramic I fish out of the fire pit. Often recyclable scraps of metal, I save and eventually toss in the recycling dumpster at the transfer station or my parent bin. I do think about the toxic chemicals produced, are interested in chemistry, though I’m not worried about a bit of smoke in wilderness. I certainly pick up enough of other people’s liter, leaving things better then I when I got there.
Maybe the most responsible, sustainable solution is the people with the large farms, ranches, and homesteads who live the low-consumption lifestyle, compost, burn, and have a trash pit that takes the residual waste from burning – the metals and glass that have no scrap value. No dump trips off the land. Taking personal responsibility.
