Saving on Trash Removal...

I recently started saving almost 30 bucks a month. I discovered the folks who were doing our trash pickup were rummaging through our garbage... Kinda creepy... Especially when one of their employees tells you they have pictures of your family in their house. (Ok... Real creepy.)... So... Yeah... I no longer allow these folks to do trash pickup... In fact... I no longer pay for trash pickup. I built an incinerator in my back yard and I burn the paper and cardboard stuff... The incinerator burns it very cleanly. We recycle our plastics, and we compost our food wastes whenever we can. Anything we can't dispose of gets taken to the dump (Or maybe thrown in the trash can at the gas station up the road. LOL)

I know... this isn't huge savings, but it's 30 bucks back in my pocket that I didn't have before. Its a start.

I'm also looking at the possibility of starting to convert the paper wastes into heat for my house during the winter months. That could prove to be exponentially more money saved.

Many areas now prohibit incinerators. I don't believe you can use them in any of the west coast states (except Alaska?)

Take that first $30 savings, and buy a paper shredder. Dump the shredded paper in your compost pile.
Better to feed your soil microbes than to put more smoke into the air.

I hate it when my neighbors burn their trash. Here whenever it rains a bunch of folks run out to set their burn piles on fire, stinking up the entire valley.

Congrats on saving $30/month! Though I agree that burning is probably not the best choice for paper products. Mulch or compost would be far more ecologically sound.

You mean there are people who actually have trash service? Haven't seen that since we left the city (going on 20 years now). If we can't compost it, burn it, or recycle it, we save it until we get a pick-up load and then haul it all to the local landfill. Fortunately we only get the equivalent of about 1 standard garbage bag of stuff that has to be discarded every month (sometimes not for two months) so it only means one or two trips a year for us.

I heartily agree about the trash burning neighbors too!!! It seems every time we have a nice day or want to spend a few hours enjoying the stars on a summer night, some idiot decides to burn all his garbage (including tires, plastic, mattresses, whatever!) and we get to smell all that for hours. I have tried to see if anything can be done about it, but here in Missouri the rules only apply if you live in the city limits. Otherwise -- if you want to burn your house down, they don't care unless it burns the neighbor's house in the process.

When I say burn my trash... I mean I burn it. The combustion is truly something to behold. I "engineered" a steel barrel with holes cut in the bottom and a 4 inch diameter smoke stack. It is designed to burn intensely... So intensely in fact that everything is reduced to ash and there really isn't much smoldering going on afterwards. The flames do this really cool cyclonic pattern and it sometimes will even speak to you. The smoke stack output is usually clear. The stinky smoke everyone is mentioning here comes from smoldering plastic, etc.

Here's my incinerator...
http://streetjesus.blogspot.com/2011/05/diy-55-gallon-drum-incinerator.html

Works for me. In the future I might try to build one out of concrete and block.

Cheers!

I would agree that composting is an improvement over burning, even if you don't bother to shred it. If you're already composting food, all the better - they go together nicely - yard clippings too! When you're ready to take that up a notch, add some household urine on top a few times a week! If you have a space for 2 piles (or pallet frame bins) you can continually alternate filling and composting, keeping them both a little wet.
When you're ready to take that up another notch, start processing other people's waste too - scraps, leaves, wood chips...we all have a cornucopia of waste around us ready to re-purpose!

Brent Rickenbacker wrote:

Works for me. In the future I might try to build one out of concrete and block.

When you do your next one, you might want to try making a fire clay mix instead of concrete. Concrete will spall after a few hot fires and probably won't work out in the long run.

I made a pretty nifty furnace once for melting bronze by drilling a regular pattern of holes in a large metal trash can then inserting bolts through the holes to hold a network of wire about 1/2 inch away from the inside walls. I plastered the refractory mix against the inside -- incorporating the wires and the ends of the bolts to keep the wet clay from slumping. There was also a 2" hole as an inlet at the bottom for inserting a metal pipe. I could build a charcoal fire inside the furnace and get it hot enough to melt a crucible of bronze by using a vacumn cleaner as a blower (reverse the suction and place the hose at the opening of the pipe at the bottom). Did the lid the same way and installed a hole for inserting the crucible and watching the fire. That thing got HOT! But the metal on the outside was barely warm. I'm sure you could do something along those lines with your 55 gallon drum to make a nice burner for your trash. (I'm thinking about building one myself now that I think about it.) You can get powdered clay and other ingredients to make refractory material at any pottery supply place and mix it yourself. It is surprisingly cheap and easy to do.

As a junk removal business owner, the real costs come from the heavy items. If you can get rid of stuff like old stoves and laundry machines on your own, you'll save yourself a good chunk of change. Unlike many trades workers who charge by the hour, we tend to charge by the load, specifically the weight. It may take us an hour to go through and clean up your home or business with the stuff you want out, but you're not paying for that time (for most business models in the junk removal business). If you can find a junk removal business who works by the hour, consider getting everything tidied up and prepped for their arrival and leave the heavy stuff for them. Just understand what their business model is and adjust accordingly.

Yes, if you can handle getting rid of stuff like gravel, rocks and dirt on your own, that will save you a lot of money. Most people need a junk removal service for bigger, bulkier items like old refrigerators, TV units and mattresses.

Brad
Brad's Junk Removal Vancouver

"Especially when one of their employees tells you they have pictures of your family in their house. (Ok... Real creepy.)"

Why were you throwing out pictures of your family?

Tyler Ludens wrote:I hate it when my neighbors burn their trash. Here whenever it rains a bunch of folks run out to set their burn piles on fire, stinking up the entire valley.

Seriously. Burning trash is absolutely classless. You might be saving a little cash, but you are outsourcing the expense to the entire community that has to deal with your air pollution.

Please, new-to-country-living folks, dont consider burning trash a solution to anything. It is a problem. Thanks in advance for your cooperation!

I'm glad the OP said he doesn't burn plastics - that is noxious. And heck, saving $30/month is awesome!

This video from 2011 still inspires me about reducing trash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQiqHgE0h3U

This family composts their paper waste, which is not something we'll be doing here are paul's project, but we do use paper and cardboard waste for lighting the new RMHs.

We just had the Farmstead Meatsmith workshops and the meat that is not currently hanging in the kitchen was wrapped in plastic wrap and butcher paper before putting in the chest freezer. We would love alternatives to plastic and paper in the future. I imagine we might can some meat in the future, though for a freezer - whether on or off grid or wofati - what's a good alternative wrap?

Brent Rickenbacker wrote:I'm also looking at the possibility of starting to convert the paper wastes into heat for my house during the winter months. That could prove to be exponentially more money saved.

Paul talks about how Ianto Evans used junk mail in a RMH (http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp) to heat his place one year. Junk mail only - no wood.

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:
We just had the Farmstead Meatsmith workshops and the meat that is not currently hanging in the kitchen was wrapped in plastic wrap and butcher paper before putting in the chest freezer. We would love alternatives to plastic and paper in the future. I imagine we might can some meat in the future, though for a freezer - whether on or off grid or wofati - what's a good alternative wrap?

You can used waxed cotton/muslin. Or hides. OLD SCHOOL. sort, of--as old school as refrigeration, anyway.

Perfect R Scott - will look at acquiring those. Might not protect from freezer burn as well plastic, but would rather salt-cure, dry or can for longer-term storage any way.

When I was making biochar in Georgia I found that paper made better char than woodchips or sticks, so I would use these in the outer barrel of my double-barrel system, and put paper of all sorts in the char barrel. The result was easy to crumble into fine flakes that would absorb a lot of urine and blend into the soil easily....

Check out this restaurant that didn't take out the trash for 2 years! (Though they do compost paper.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/28/zero-waste-restaurant_n_5215019.html

They can actually claim to be zero waste because the trash that they did accumulate over two years was taken by an artist to be upcycled into a sculpture.

Here's an update on the Zero Waste Home where she shows the quart jar of trash they create annually.



Follow the link above for a detailed description of all of the contents of the jar.

I would love for base camp to achieve something close to this.

Another blogger and successful Kickstarter campaign in a similar vein: http://www.trashisfortossers.com/. This is an event at a park, in a tipi, where she demonstrated how to create zero waste toothpaste.

We are on the route to creating zero trash, but very much not there yet. I use waste paper to eg note my pizzaoven - except toilet paper, which I bury along with stale bread (the amount we don't reuse otherwise or feed the dog).

The only waste i take to the trashstation is containers - most glass containers we reuse, but the rest we recycle. Once we producere most og our own food that will be gone most of it too

I've used broken glass to replace gravel when mixing concrete. It doesn't need to be broken down much before mixing. Large shards break up when they are the first things placed in the mixer along with some softball sized rocks. Let it run a while, then add sand and cement.

I wear a full face asbestos mask to protect eyes and lungs.

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:
We just had the Farmstead Meatsmith workshops and the meat that is not currently hanging in the kitchen was wrapped in plastic wrap and butcher paper before putting in the chest freezer. We would love alternatives to plastic and paper in the future. I imagine we might can some meat in the future, though for a freezer - whether on or off grid or wofati - what's a good alternative wrap?

Do you have mutton cloth? It's a finely knitted, stretchy fabric for wrapping....mutton!...or other meats. Another alternative is a clean sheet. Wrap the carcass and secure with clothes pegs.

Sue Rine wrote:Do you have mutton cloth? It's a finely knitted, stretchy fabric for wrapping....mutton!...or other meats. Another alternative is a clean sheet. Wrap the carcass and secure with clothes pegs.

Oh, mutton cloth or a sheet sounds great! I'd also heard of using some oiled or waxed duck cloth or even leather to wrap around meats or other food for storage. I will definitely be looking for mutton cloth and extra sheets from the thrift store.

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:

Sue Rine wrote:Do you have mutton cloth? It's a finely knitted, stretchy fabric for wrapping....mutton!...or other meats. Another alternative is a clean sheet. Wrap the carcass and secure with clothes pegs.

Oh, mutton cloth or a sheet sounds great! I'd also heard of using some oiled or waxed duck cloth or even leather to wrap around meats or other food for storage. I will definitely be looking for mutton cloth and extra sheets from the thrift store.

I wonder how much 'finer' mutton cloth is than t-shirt knits? Separated from my everyday kitchen 'rags', I use a lot of thrift store white t-shirts around the kitchen for straining, wrapping cheese, etc., and have a special stash of cut and super cleaned ones in my herbal medicine cabinet for poultice and other uses. Maybe you can find all at the thrift store For a while, cotton knit sheets were popular.........I still find them in odd colors and occasionally a good white one.
I remember butcher paper wrapped packages of meat tied with string from the community 'locker' where my parents butchered meat was stored.

From what I found on the Internet, it sounds like mutton cloth is similar, though perhaps tighter woven/heartier, than cheese cloth and are often used interchangeably. A quick Google shopping search doesn't show mutton cloth readily available in the U.S. Or perhaps it's called something else here and I don't know what to search for. :-/

I like your idea of finding cotton knits at the thrift store, Judith. For food, including meats; cheese, and poultices. I've had difficulty finding 100% cotton sheets at the thrift store, but with some patience (which I'm seriously lacking when I'm running errands - especially since a *short* errand trip takes about 4 hours for us!) I imagine I could find some here or there. Others might not have an issue with poly-cotton sheets, but for some reason, I just can't buy those, even secondhand.

I've had difficulty finding 100% cotton sheets at the thrift store,

It is hard to find them even here......I like the backs of nice linen, cotton and rami white blouses for some food related things too, straining cheese, wine pulp, herb teas....maybe some are large enough for wrapping meat but then there is some waste in cutting up a garment. Sheets are nice because there is no waste really. I do add used white (not colored) rags to our pooper compost.
I draw the line at cotton/poly blends both in t-shirts and any other cloth also...it doesn't have any absorbancy and mostly I just don't like synthetics.

Take glass jars with lids to the grocery store. Remove plastic wrappings and put the stuff you bought in the glass jars. Put the plastic in the store's trash can. Better.... Try not to buy stuff in plastic.