Except that the line is “take out the papers and the trash,” which kind of is redundant, unless you figure that old newspapers are in a category of their own.
My parents still use a 55 gallon burn barrel (rural small SE Michigan town).
I remember as kid of 10-11 years young taking out the combustibles to burn as part of my chores.
One day I had to burn a bunch of cardboard and couldn’t get it to light.
So thinking I was brilliant or something, unloaded it down to a few pieces cardboard and soaked them with gasoline. Then loaded in the rest of the cardboard in to the burn barrel.
What happened next is forever imprinted into my memory of **What Stupid Kids Sometimes Do.
**
About 1.5 milliseconds after I lit it, the gasoline fumes turned the burn barrel into a launch-tube that sent an entire 55 gallon barrel of flaming, smoking cardboard into the sky - trying at least to achieve sub-orbital status.
I was thankful it had rained earlier and didn’t set the country-side on fire.
The entire barrel or just the contents?
Just the contents. Thank goodness.
I doubt if I could explain away how our burn barrel went into orbit and melted upon re-entry.
It is stuff like that from my childhood that amazes me that I am still among the living.
To the OP. Yes, people still burn their trash when not restricted from doing so.
FWIW - one of the pieces of evidence the US Intelligence community relied on in determining that it was probably Osama Bin Laden at that house was that he burned his trash - unlike his neighbors.
Not sure how this helps the OP, but apparently it’s unusual enough in other parts of the world to (in very small part) be responsible for getting a Seal team to knock on (or rather blow off) your door.
Yep. when we bought out house in Gardena, in about 1959, there was a incinerator in the backyard, which we used for a short time, then they started to have “no burn days” then finally banned the practice.
Up to my junior high years in the early 70s, we lived in a small town, and burning the trash was my job. Parents split, moved with mom to a growing side of the same town, and burning was not allowed there.
Fast forward to mid 2000s, and I just bought a house in North Carolina. Although burning trash violated a county ordinance, dang near everyone had a barrel and burned. I did too, until the barrel rusted through and fell apart. It lasted long enough to burn old checks and other items we didn’t want going to the landfill after moving in.
In my suburban neighborhood in the early 70’s it was common to burn yard waste, and less common to burn household trash. Garbage collection came weekly, so in Summer when the trash got a little too ripe you’d see a few families out burning it.
Burning leaves was the scent of Autumn, and I still miss it.
I grew up near Los Angeles in the 50’s and 60’s and we had an incinerator very similar to the link in the OP. It was one of the household chores, to separate the paper and other burnable trash from cans and bottles, then burn it. It was outlawed in the early 60’s as a smog control measure.
I remember growing up in Toronto that the trash/garbage was collected from houses. My dad got a nasty note from the collection people when we moved to the suburbs, informing him he needed a trash can, paper bags weren’t acceptable.
All the apartment buildings, however, had incinerators and on garbage day there would be one or two dozen standard garbage cans full of cinders out on the curb. When we lived in an apartment, all our garbase/trash went into paper bags and down the chute to be incinerated. those cans included burned tin cans and bottles.
Remember time were different then. Most packaging was cardboard boxes, instead of foam inserts or plastic wrap there was cardboard and paper. Groceries went into paper bags, food came in cardboard boxes, tin cans, glass jars, tin (aluminum) foil and wax paper. Toys or small items were just switching from stamped metal to plastic for cases and such. The opportunities for bizarre chemicals off-gassing were much less. Of course, the cars driving by were using leaded gasoline, many larger buildings still used coal for heat, so what’s a bit of smoke going to hurt?
you still read in the news every so often of massive traffic pile-ups where some famer was burning stubble in a field and created a zero-visibility problem on a nearby highway - but most decent-sized municipalities made it illegal to have open fires except under controlled conditions.
Thanks! I’m pretty sure I’m the one that conflated the names.
When I was in high school, we moved to one of the last agricurturally zoned acres in the area. The lot had dozens of fruit and avocado trees on it, even though we were in the middle of the suburbs. The yearly pruning produced a lot of yard/wood waste, and it was long before the local trash pickup dealt with yard waste.
Dad would let the prunings set for a week or two and then burn them. I forget what kind of container he used. Because fires were legal if you were cooking in your yard, he had a dedicated pack of hot dogs that he always took out with him when he burned. At all other times that pack sat in the freezer. There was a note on them so that no one would accidentallly eat them. They just got thawed and refrozen, over and over.
My parents live out in the country. We always burned trash when I was growing up. One thing to remember is we had a lot more burnable trash back in the past with things like newspapers, junk mail, and TV guides. The county finally began cracking down on trash burning a few years back and they’ve (mostly) stopped doing it.
Whatever trash wasn’t burned had to be taken to the town dump. When I was young, you could bring stuff to the dump for free but now there’s a charge for a lot of it. Plus now you have to sort out various recyclables.
We had a trash barrel growing up, it was used occasionally. Two houses on my short road in a rural part of Virginia have trash barrels that I see them use fairly often. One is a lady probably 65 years old, the other is a couple in their 50s.
My brother lived in Scottsdale and started a small (he thought) fire in the back yard, mostly yard clippings but who knows what he and his boys were burning. Soon they heard fire truck sirens coming down the street, so he had one of the boys run into the house to grab a package of hot dogs. When the firemen arrived, he told them he’s just having a “weenie-roast” with the kids; they let him off with a warning.
We burned our trash in what everybody call “the ashpit”. I think my parents did til 89 or so. The house was on the outskirts of town there was no garbage pickup at all, so we burned everything. I can’t find any good pictures on line, but in our neighborhood they were all cubes of cement, maybe 5 feet on a side. There was a hole in the top that was just covered with a 1/2 inch steel plate with a welded handle for pushing and pulling it around. There was another hole in the side at the ground covered by another steel plate that you pulled out every couple months to empty it.
I can’t for the life of me remember what we did with the ashes, but cleaning the ashpit was one of my chores as a kid.
My grandma also had one at her house in the middle of town, but it wasn’t used anymore.
Thee sound of that plate sliding across the cement is one of the sounds so completely burned in my mind, I can recall it as though it was live many years later.
We have a burn barrel.
After I bought it, I shot a bunch of holes in it using my .308 rifle.
Works well.
Growing up in the 50s in a suburb of San Jose, I was often in charge of burning the yard waste. But never on Monday in that area because that was Wash Day, when all the clothes lines were full of the week’s wash, and it would not be neighborly to get ash on your neighbor’s sheets and undies.
At least one local hardware store sells burn barrels, made by a local from 55 gallon drums. We don’t burn anything, any food scraps go to the chickens, or the goat. We recycle everything else, even though it is pain. There is no local recycling schemes, we have to take everything to Wallmart to dispose of it properly. A lot of locals here won’t pay for disposal, so they burn stuff, or dump it on the roads. It sucks.
We live in an unincorporated area in Iowa and we burn paper weekly to every other week. We do have garbage pick-up from a private service. Our previous service changed the rules on us and said we can only put out 2 cans a week. We are a family of 5 and that just wasn’t going to cut it. The new service doesn’t care if we put out 1 or 15 cans and they even took the gutted pc we had sitting by the house (it was destined to be put in a car that was sent to be scrapped… no hard drive in it, of course.)
What we use to burn is a 4x4x4 cage made from hog panel. We’ve only had 2 times in the past 15 years when we couldn’t burn due to drought and burn bans.
Some of my fondest childhood memories was tossing model rocket engines into the burn barrel … [sigh] … it was worth the whipping I got.
We’re encouraged to burn leaves, brush and branches here … between Oct 15th and June 15th and we have to call the burn-line to make sure there’s no inversion so the smoke vents away … the county has limited landfill space and burning clean “organic” waste isn’t harmful.
Garbage can never be burned but you can get special permission to burn some construction waste.
It’s been 5 years since there’s been any funding for enforcement …