Burning trash?

I've gotten pretty interested in the RMH concept. I remember Paul talking about heating for an entire winter just on junk mail. This got me thinking, much plastic and other oil based stuff burns really well. The main concern with burning them is the smoke they release into the atmosphere. But if you're burning extremely efficiently at a very high temperature in a RMH, would they essentially burn "clean?"

I think there's a TON of potential thermal energy stored in hydrocarbons, I make my own campfire starters with petroleum jelly or wax and that adds a crazy amount of burn time and heat to them. Could we harness that for heating as well?

As long as we stay away from chlorinated plastics and are certain that the combustion is clean and complete, this is a low-risk activity. However, there is a considerably chunk of the general population, and (probably more importantly) official departments of Sad Making, that would be aghast that anyone would contemplate doing this. So I tend to talk about it in hypothetical terms most of the time.

Compared to what passes for recycling in most places nowadays, which usually looks like either a short trip to landfill or bulk cargo carriers going to the global South where it gets burned in piles or washed into the ocean, this seems like one of the least bad options. It also means you don't have to rinse out the last bit of yogurt, bacon juice, or Sriracha sauce.

How can you tell if it's chlorinated plastic, and what's the risk with that?

M Pearson wrote:How can you tell if it's chlorinated plastic, and what's the risk with that?

Chlorinated plastics like PVC / CVPC have incredibly useful physical properties.

However, when they are burned they release a plume of incredibly persistent, carcinogenic, fat soluble chemicals. Dioxins and furans. These are truly evil compounds.

There is no way to burn these cleanly outside of a massively hot, controlled and regulated industrial facility. And even these struggle.

Personally I would not burn plastics unless it was an extreme emergency. There are too many unknowns, and too much that can go wrong. My 2c.

Burning plastic is nasty. I remember living next to a neighbor who burned plastic in her woodstove (yeah, not a RMH) and it was awful. Made my eyes burn inside my home. I'm pretty sure it was toxic as heck. Even with a RMH, I can't help but wonder how much pollution would spill out.

Burning trash is pretty common out here. We don't cause its easier to just toss it in the gas station trash can for us. We don't make much. But Id imagine burning it in a RMH would be better then the just pile it in a pit and burn it method that kills my throat when the neighbor burns trash.
Would it damage the RMH at all to burn plastics in it?
Weird build up or something?
Is the foot print better to burn it at home and be responsible for our trash?
Or is that misguided and its better to take care of it in a land fill?
I imagine proper recycling is better but that doesn't exist here sadly.

Well, anecdotally speaking, I know a guy who has put bits of plastic in two different J-tubes. He always waits until they're up to operating temperature and rocketing along nicely, and then he'll drop in a few bits of plastic alongside the wood that's burning. He goes for a low ratio of plastic to wood, always keeps an eye on the exhaust for any visible smoke (none), and occasionally walks downwind to see if he can detect any "off" smells (again, none). He's done this with polyethylene, polystyrene, nylon, polyester, PET, milk jugs, sandwich bags, bale twine, and broken garden hose. The only thing that was ever left behind was fibreglass reinforcement that was embedded in a plastic coated tarp that was used as an outdoor billboard (great source of cheap tarps if you need to cover stuff).

This same guy also has a downdraft gasifier modification in his indoor wood fire, and has been known to throw the odd plastic bag or scrap in there when it's burning nice and hot. Either way, RMH or home fire, he's getting heat value out of a waste product.

pvc plastics are usually the hard types and tend to be more brittle --- usually no  information label moulded into it---as can be seen on HDPE and LDPE containers, there was someone asking on permies about incinerating plastic awhile back , somewhere in the Himalaya , the stove build advise was to create a longer secondary burn ---but not too an extreme heat ---as this would create NO2----and for 2 to 3 seconds at minimum---with more turbulence maybe--so the dioxins would have a long enough high temperature exposure to be broken apart and kept from recombining ---before exiting the flue---dont know how far they got with this.

one finger typing expert here, and with no link savy, it was not posted as a permies question ,but spotted it here ------- "Low -Cost ,High temperature waste disposal incinerator-a prototype by semcol" was a linkdin posting

tony uljee wrote:one finger typing expert here, and with no link savy, it was not posted as a permies question ,but spotted it here ------- "Low -Cost ,High temperature waste disposal incinerator-a prototype by semcol" was a linkdin posting

Found the link for you - Low–Cost, High–Temperature Waste–Disposal Incinerator: A Prototype in SECMOL

SECMOL (a self-sustainable campus), has always emphasized on minimal consumption of plastic in the campus to meet our needs, promoting the principles of Reduce and Reuse, as much as possible. However, at the end of the day, we still find materials that are a complete waste and cannot be used in any other way. A major part of this waste comprises of sanitary napkins, as around 40 – 50% of our campus population comprises of females. Until recently, we too had to rely on burying these wastes under the infertile ground. But now, we are looking for an alternate solution to this menace – High Temperature Incineration ensuring complete combustion - with the help of Himalayan Rocket Stove Team.