Alrighty then. How do you currently dispose of household waste? 1) - dot gov pickup by your local authority (city, county, or other) 2) - Private contract hauler (Waste Management or other commercial operation, with or without separating recyclables.) 3) - Open burn in backyard (or front, you hillbilly, you) 4) - 55 gal drum burner 5) - Home built or commercially sold home incinerator (Love to see pix of the homebuilts and links to the commercial units.) 6) - "Friendly" dumpster at work or near home 7) - Other - please describe How will your disposal plan change when SHTF? FWIW, I separate out glass, ferrous and non ferrrous metals into barrels and haul them to a recycle center when the barrels are full. If the recycle center closes, there will be piles in the back woods. Other than that, no change when SHTF.
County recycles and has multiple pickup locations. I separate glass, plastic, aluminum, tin cans, cardboard, newspapers, magazines. The rest I either burn in 55 gallon drum with removable grate top and bottom side vent holes or compact it at recycle pickup station probably 50/50 on that. I also cross cut shred personal data I don't want gleaned from my trash. Oh, and compost most food items.
If the S_REALLY_HTF, garbage collection won't be much of a problem. --For one thing, there won't be the supply of it as there is now. --There won't be the people there are now. --You'll save EVERYTHING for some future use. There won't be a bushel basket a year of stuff you won't re-use.
That kind of forward thinking is critical to community survival as well as single family. One man's trash takes on a whole new meaning.
I burn the daily garbage in the 55 gal drum. The major stuff goes down the hill a few hundred yards and into a large burn pit. Add a gallon of old used oil, and a match and poof.
Paper, cardboard and junk mail get burned to help heat the house, veggie scraps get fed to the chickens, glass, cans, and plastic get recycled. Everything else gets hauled to the transfer station where the county deals with it.
We have very little other than recyclable because we either re-use, re-purpose, burn invasives, or compost literally everything. We could probably cancel our county service and go it on our own right now. We would not have been able to do this just 2 years ago when we were good little "consumers".
We don't have much trash, because we reuse/recycle alot, some gets burnt, some gets composted. And what does need to be dumped, since we only have like a plastic grocery bag of trash a week at best, we'll put it in outside trash cans in town, like at Walmart. We don't generate enough trash to make it financially viable to pay Waste Management to pick it up.
Composting, recycling and resuse: glass, plastics and metals. There's a guy that lives above me with a forge and he loves all metals! We are working on separating plastics for resue, most are injection molded and are easily recycled into other forms and items. Glass is harder, but we are considering making a forge/furnace to reuse all we collect.
since i live right now in a major city and every thing is picked up or taken to the recycleing center in plastic and cans set up for extras money for prepping .. out in the county where i lived i use a 55.gallon sized metal barrel for burning items ..
We use a rather Large Burn Can, and then send the ashes south to a Landfill, in Washington State, as REQUIRED by the EPA. I make about 2 ea. 55USG Drums of ashes, in a winter. We use to have a Public Landfill site here, but the EPA FORCED us to close it about ten years ago, and then put these STUPID Regulations in place, to deal with the ashes. I mean really... what is the point of shipping 100 USG of ashes 1000 miles, just to bury it, when we could just bury it right here.... Oh Well... and they wonder why the price of stuff, goes UP....
