Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is full of trash burning tutorials. Some of them are exceptionally stupid and talk about "clean burners", which is essentially a burn barrel connected to a leaf blower, such that the smoke is dispersed, creating the illusion of "clean" air.

Such dumb tutorials have hundreds of hundreds of thousands of views. Each video has dumb comments on them like "Oh yeah this burner is awesome, I made the same thing at home and it worked, thank you". YouTube declines to remove the videos.

A burn barrel burns trash at a lower temperature than an incinerator and doesn't do any sort of filtering. A burn barrel can generate more pollution than a small city, including harmful chemicals like dioxin and furans.

YouTube should ban all trash burning content. The makers of those videos should be deanonymized and be reported to environmental authorities. There should be a large crack down on stupid backyard burning content. It should be made illegal and each one of those residential superpolluters should be hunted down and thrown in jail.

It is so upsetting to watch those videos, with people saying "I saved $50 burning my trash at home, I am so smart". Fuck!

Also, the government should require garden equipment to have a fucking catalytic converter. But they won't because that will hurt their numbers. A gas powered leaf blower pollutes as much as a multitude of cars.

This is why trash pickup should be free. That way it will be disposed of properly instead of dumped on the side of the road or burned in backyard barrels. Yet most cities charge for trash pickup and are looking to charge even more or move to quantity-based fees.

You get what you incentivize. If you want people to dispose of trash in the least damaging way, you have to make that the easiest and cheapest option.

True, but then you have a different problem: you incentive people to generate more trash.

There must be a balance.

Never have I felt “incentivized” to produce trash. Most of my trash is because the government doesn’t curb overpackaging of products.

Well, if you want to look for alternatives, join /r/zerowaste.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroWaste/wiki/index/

My family lived outside the city limits of a rural town and trash service wasn’t even available to us. Us and every single family in that situation used a burn barrel. There are a huge number of people in America that have never done it any other way!

There was a waste dump / transfer station you could haul your trash to...

Have you heard of dioxin?

While I sympathize with the sentiment, that creating some kind of censorship dystopia will magically solve the problem, the idea has no traction when most of the people doing so make less than $1 a day somewhere in a remote corner of the world. This is the problem I have with climate activism.

The best way to reduce pollution is to raise the standard of living for people around the world. People who are wealthy can afford cleaner forms of energy, they can afford to dispose of trash cleanly, they can afford to recycle. People that are poor have nothing to lose and don't care about "environmental authorities". "Let's ban X", "Let's force people to do Y" and "Throw them in jail" is not a reasonable or effective way to solve problems. It also further divides people and does more to hurt your cause than to promote it.

We are not talking about energy, we are talking about waste disposal.

And not having money is not a excuse for burning trash. In part, because burning some types of trash (pretty much anything other than yard trimmings, including food) will make you and your community incredibly sick, causing you to spend more money in the end.

It's already illegal to burn trash in almost every jurisdiction on earth. I am just calling for the removal of content featuring activities that are already illegal.

https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/html/i...

Then, is censorship a solution here? fuck yes. Let's fucking do it. I am all for the censorship of that content. The less of it, the better. Will that inconvenience some people? Fucking fantastic. No ad revenue for the morons working against society, making residential super-polluting videos. They should be in jail, not on YouTube.

It's normally much easier to buy e.g. a computer, a mattress, various household chemicals than to get rid of them properly. We need to tackle one or both sides of this equation, or people will just dump stuff in their local river if you censor the burning video.

It's the old piracy argument again, loads of money was spent trying to take down pirate mp3 sites without results, then Spotify comes along. But maybe recycling some of this stuff is really difficult, in which case the cost of dealing with it should be factored into the price.

A bad analogy for this case, because pirating mp3s doesn't give you, your family and your neighborhood cancer and doesn't generate fat soluble toxic chemicals that accumulate in wildlife, livestock and humans for decades.

Oh, really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_dung_fuel

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us...

They don't incinerate waste in open air, unlike backyard burn barrels. Also, burning happens at high temperatures, and emissions are captured.

It's a completely different process than simply just burning trash in a barrel.

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