We quickly figured out that garbage is a huge problem when we no longer have the city taking it away for us.  The problem with the city system is that our garbage is removed, so out of sight, out of mind.  We give no thought to what happens to all the crap we throw away or even the volumes that were being tossed every day.  

But when living off-grid, this becomes a real issue and it is very much front and center in our minds.  We quickly had to find a way to deal with it as we decided that we did not want to send anything away.  We felt that by sending stuff to a land fill we were give our problems away to somebody else.  We wanted to deal with everything right here and not be a burden on others!  

Our plastic waste and slop pail

Food Waste

By far, the largest by volume and weight is the amount of waste we generate when we prepare meals.  This was easily remedied by getting chickens or pigs.  We keep a yellow five gallon pail beside the counter and all the food waste goes into the slop pail.  Even water that we pour off of any veggies that we cook goes into the pail.  All of that then goes to the animals.  We compost a few items as laying hens should not eat specific items like raw potato peels, onions and citrus peels.  We also don't feed them egg shells unless they have been cooked or baked.  Otherwise, they get a taste for eggs and start eating their own eggs.  Egg shells go into the greenhouse, the rest gets composted.

This category increased once we started growing and eating our own food.  Getting back into the kitchen is a very healthy activity and the slop pail fills quickly with this great activity.  

Paper Waste

When we lived in the city, we ate industrial food and as a result we generated a LOT of paper trash.  But now that we live off grid and grow our own food, we have very little paper trash left to worry about.  Any that we do get goes into the stove and gets burnt.  So nothing to worry about.  We actually receive boxes of paper from friends in the city as we use it for our fires all winter.  

Cans and glass

Again, this category was reduced significantly when we started growing our own food.  Since a lot of industrial food comes in cans and jars, we were throwing a lot of this away.  However, we don't have many cans any more and any jars that we do get goes towards storing things in my shop or we re-purpose for storing food, seeds and other items within the home.  Any glass or cans we do get does go to the transfer station for recycling or we take into the bottle depot for deposit.

Plastic

This category has been a frustrating experience as the world seems to have a love affair for plastic.  But for us it is a terrible nightmare to deal with this stuff.  I look forward to the day where devices are created so that we can convert plastic to oil or clean energy or when plastic goes away.  Until then, we have to find some way to deal with it.  We tried burning barrels but they resulted in a cold, smoldering fire which created black billowing smoke and left a huge molten mass of gooey crap to deal with.  

What I did to resolve this issue was to build an incinerator that could burn the plastic cleanly, with high temperatures and leave little to no residue behind.  So I took an old tractor tire rim, put a grate over top of it and put a culvert on top of the grate.  The culvert acts like a chimney which draws air upwards through the material.  That draws fresh air in from underneath.  As a result, the fire is well feed and I get temperatures hot enough to melt glass, burn chicken bones and incinerate the plastic with white smoke or even no smoke at all.  

We burn chicken bones so that the dogs don't choke on them.  We could compost them, but then we risk the dogs digging through the compost to get to the bones.  So we burn them with the plastic.  We do give the dogs the bigger bones from cows, pigs and goats for them to chew on.  Our fires are hot enough to burn the majority of the bone and the dogs don't seem to want to dig through the garbage either as there is no other food in there.

Reducing the plastic is tough as a lot of people bring food wrapped in plastic when they come to visit.  But we have done well over the years.  The amount of garbage that we burn is now down to a small plastic bag per week.  The first picture in this blog shows the compost pail with the plastic garbage.  Our goal is to have zero garbage to burn.  So we still have some work to do, but we are making significant progress.  

Our goal:  No plastic, no burning, no dump!