In Pennsylvania, state law allows rural households to burn “domestic refuse” unless prohibited by the local townships. 🔥Many small towns look the other way, and plenty of small farms and homesteads burn their trash – everything they throw away – except maybe food waste that they compost and metals and glass which they either take to the landfill or the transfer station for in some cases for recycling once a year or so.🚮

It actually works pretty good and saves the rural homesteads money while keeping garbage out of the landfill.🏡 I’ve burned garbage over the years, composting, and saving recycling metals and glass aren’t rocket science. Burn barrels, while smelly and somewhat toxic, have proven a solid way of rural households to dispose of most of their ordinary household trash. Trash disposal in country isn’t a big deal if you have land, and can burn most of it.🔥 Many if not most homesteaders and farmers in states that allow open burning do so, despite the smell and the sometimes noxious compounds released.

And it can and does smell bad, especially when people burn it in barrels without additional fuel. I had actually forgotten how pungent it can be driving through small town Pennsylvania on a warm summer night with smoldering trash barrel out back. The smell of polystyrene breaking down in a smoldering fire is particularly pungent. ☁Makes me think when I own my off-grid home I’ll probably want to have garbage cans, save the garbage then build a hot fire and burn what I can without as many noxious fumes.

I do like fire and I do like the idea of living without expensive trash pick up,💸 limiting my landfill disposal to a small bag every year, 🚮burning and comparing the bulk of it. Maybe even getting money rather than paying money 💵 for my aluminum cans and tin cans at a scrap yard. ♻ I’m not that worried about pollution in the kind of rural area that I eventually want to live in. More power to the Pennsylvania redneck that burns! 💪🔥