Avoid the Landfill: Build a Bonfire with Household Items and Trash

Have you ever wondered what happens to your household trash after you drop it off at the county dump or leave it on your curb for the garbage collector to come pick it up? The answer is: nothing. Not for many years will it begin the natural process of decomposition and complete the circle of life. The rate at which the nation's landfills are filling up is astonishing and in years to come we may be paying a premium to unload our waste. Studies have shown that a single Oscar Mayer hot dog may take up to 50 years to decompose after being packed into the rest of the trash in one of these landfills. That's half a century for a biodegradable product that could otherwise be returned to the earth in a matter of minutes. Our landfills are filling rapidly and I propose a solution: Burn, baby, burn.

I'm not going to lie and say the reason my roommate and I started burning a lot of our household trash was to save the environment. Basically, we don't have garbage pickup, we were too broke to get a county sticker to take the stuff to the dump, and it was a Saturday night and we wanted to build a bonfire. We only had a couple pieces of firewood but several garbage bags full of beer cans, soda cans, newspapers and food trash.

How We Started

We dug a firepit in our backyard, about four feet by four feet, and surrounded it with cinder blocks. After we were done with that, the thinking ended. We just started throwing trash in there, without sorting through it, and we ended up with a big, smoky, ashy mess. The next day we cleaned out the firepit and learned our first lesson: aluminum cans don't burn. This is what started us recycling our aluminum, and in fact, we've made about $30 from it. We also realized that burning glass is a bad idea unless the container has an opening, because we had a couple close calls from exploding or near-exploding bottles. We also had a near-death experience with an aerosol can - Barbasol can be lethal, kids. 

The Naughty List

Here's a short list of items from the trash that are very poor (and often dangerous) bonfire ingredients: