I was watching an episode of “My Three Sons” today from 1960. The father repeatedly instructs his son to remember to burn the trash. It seems to be part of their Monday routine. They briefly show the trash in question and it doesn’t look like anything special, just paper products and such.
Was it common practice in those days to burn trash instead of leaving it out for garbage pickup or taking it to a dump site? Would it have been put in an incinerator they owned?
Just got further in the episode and here is the contraption they ended up using in the backyard. I’ve never seen anything like this in anyone’s backyard before.
Here are two screenshots showing it being opened and lit:
I think it was pretty common in the country, and some suburbs.
I know it used to be common in rural areas.
We lived in a suburb of Detroit, and burned ours in a barrel in back of the garage. We had a garbage can, and it only took so much, and with 4 kids, we had too much trash already. Some homes hade built in incinerators.
We did, too. 55 gallon drums were cheap, and burning things like Kleenex and food cartons was more sanitary.
Weren’t there dangers with releasing toxic chemicals or starting fires with this? I realize that back then, people didn’t care as much about stuff like that.
When did these start getting phased out? Presumably there are EPA regulations and such against it now?
Here’s a page on garbage collection history from the aptly named Suburban Waste Services.
Although it says that backyard trash burning was mostly stopped after WWII, I’m sure that a lot of places let it continue, or at least didn’t pay much formal attention.
I think the missing piece of the history is that suburbs often didn’t have municipal trash collectors like cities did. You contracted with a private company and they would charge you by the amount you threw out. That gave huge incentives to burning garbage. Leaf burning was common in fall, which makes sense if the alternative was paying someone to haul it away.
Smog and air pollution became national concerns in the 1960s, leading to the EPA and the Clean Air Act, but suburban pollution from backyard burning was also condemned.
I imagine that depends on the location and time. As a single data point, both of my grandmothers lived within a block of each other in the same suburb. One had a free standing brick incinerator in the back yard that was used into the mid-sixties. I don’t remember anyone else in the neighborhood doing it that late.
I remember my dad saying that Jesse Unruh ran for mayor of LA saying people wouldn’t have to separage their trash from their garbage. According to wikipedia, that was in 1973, though. So either Dad got it wrong or he was talking about another office and I remembered it wrong.
It was really common in the country and some suburbs at least until the 80’s. There was no trash pickup and the nearest dump (no, not a landfill, just a an open dump) was many miles away and a pain to deal with except when you had to. We didn’t use anything fancy like that contraption though. People just used recycled steel barrels until they got too rusted out and burned through and then put another one right beside the old one.
The old days (meaning before the 90’s in many areas) were an environmental horror show. People dumped large appliances in the nearest woods, threw trash freely out of car windows and then burned what was left including old tires if you had a bunch of them to get rid of (that produces some incredible smoke if you have never witnessed it). Almost all ocean and lake beaches were littered with a combination of broken glass, pop-top tabs, cans and masses of cigarette butts.
It wasn’t until the 80’s that there was significant pressure to do anything about that in many areas including the most basic things like not dropping trash wherever you felt like it and it took a few years plus well-marketed legislation to turn things around. The slogan ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ was developed during that time to try and convince people that littering is not cool and you were being disrespectful to the state if you didn’t follow it (plus some hefty fines if you were caught). That worked eventually but it took a major social push and some time. Other states and regions implemented versions of the same idea around that time as well.
I remember backyard incinerators in the 60s. Once I was helping a friend burn his trash. It was in a sort of metal mesh garbage can (can’t find a photo, but our store had this type for sale). They had accidentally put an aerosol can in it, and it exploded up into the air like a rocket.
There was a columnist in Schenectady who explained that as a boy, they had a garbage pit, where they’d throw food waste. Every once in awhile they had to dig a new pit (after covering over the old one).
Of course, people differentiated between garbage (food waste) and trash (paper waste). That’s the point of the first line of the Coasters’ “Yakety-Yak”: “Take out the garbage and the trash.” The line was no redundant when the song was written.
The suburban Connecticut town in which I grew up (and my parents still live) still doesn’t have municipal trash collection. You could contract with a private company and some do. But the majority take their trash to the transfer station. It’s so common that you’ll find candidates for town office or the state legislature standing there to shake hands and meet the electorate.
my apartment building (built in the early-to-mid 1960s) had an incinerator, the door to it is still in the basement.
Interesting. There’s an episode of the West Wing where a fledgling candidate goes to help people unload trash, and I’d never really understood why he would expect to see so many people there or why people were loading cars up with trash.
(I also live in a suburban area without government trash pickup, but there is no option of loading up your car and driving it somewhere where it’s legal to dump it. The landfill is far away and doesn’t, to my knowledge, accept carloads of trash. You either pay a trash company or you mooch off someone and hope not to get caught.)
It *still is *very common in rural areas. The Forestry Dept. will even provide instructions on how to build your incinerator.
http://www.oregon.gov/odf/pages/field/astoria/protection_from_fire/home_incinerator_tips.aspx
No permits are needed outside of fire season, normally July-Sept. Sometimes during very dry seasons, like right now, a complete burn ban is implemented. The rest of the year just burn away!
I burn all my trash and yard debris for most of the year and take it to the dump during the summer.
In 1953 by parents purchases a home in a suburban community in northern Colorado. Two of the features (maybe options) were clothes lines and an concrete incinerator.
Bob
Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles from 1961 to 1973. From Wikipedia:
Not Jess Unruh, Sam Yorty. Before Yorty, well I’ll let Wiki explain it:
So in the city of Los Angeles we used incinerators until 1957.
Wow. Simulpost of simulposts!
The supermarket that I worked at during high school up until 1991 had an incinerator that I loved to claim as my own personal pyromania experiment during my working hours. I used to love to burn so much stuff so fast that it would make things outside the room start to smoke and it would get so hot that no one could get within 10 feet of it. I accidentally set the cinder block room filled with boxes it was contained in on fire several times but luckily the flames were easily contained just by shutting the fireproof doors. A few shopping carts didn’t live through the experience however - RIP.
We would burn anything that could burn back then and you would be really surprised at what you can burn if you can just build a hot enough fire. It is ashes to ashes and dust to dust when done aggressively.
