How To Dispose of Your Trash Off-Grid

Before moving off-grid to our ranch here in Baja I assumed that there was trash pick-up everywhere in the world. After all, I grew up down a dirt road underneath the redwoods and a little trash truck came to pick up and dispose of our trash all the way out there! It was some neighborhood dude with a Ford F150 who came to do the service, but I still count that as trash disposal service.

Upon arriving at my niece’s ranch in Baja (which was the first spot we stayed at in Mexico when we were ranch hunting), I learned how most people living rurally in Baja dispose of their trash. They burn it. Now, before you get offended by the amount of toxins being released into the environment by burning plastic, remember…at Our Baja Homestead we direct our eco-outrage at companies and billionaires, rather than individuals. In this blog post, I will explain how you can safely burn some of your trash. 

The famous ethnobotanist and scholar, Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan, writes about indigenous people’s agriculture and ancestral practices in his 1989 book “Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation”. Nabhan explains, “There is no sinister industrialist to target as the enemy. There are just individuals like you and me, many of whom merely want what we take for granted: a leakproof roof above their heads, enough food for their families, and enough fuel for their families” (Nabhan, 1989). We can apply this same compassionate understanding to those who live rurally and who do not have access to a car or public dumpster. Let’s just assume everybody is doing their best with what they have!

When living in a rural location that does not offer trash disposal there are three options on what to do with your trash: burn it, take it to the dump/public dumpster, or you can upcycle it. These three options can be rotated, or you can do all three if you have different types of trash. Let’s discuss!

Option 1: Burn My Trash

In order to burn your trash you are going to have to have a trash can with a lid to put your trash in while you’re waiting for burn day. If you’re a pyromaniac and want to burn daily, that’s one way to go about trash disposal as well! In our homestead we burn trash every few days as needed. If it is a rainy or foggy season we burn every time the sun comes out. 

Some people like to burn their trash in a dug out hole, so that the fire stays contained. On our homestead we use an old washing machine drum on top of concrete blocks, and that mostly contains the trash. 

WIND ADVISORY: Do not burn your trash when it is windy out. The wind can pick up the ashes/sparks and cause a forest fire.   

Make sure that you are burning burnable things. Paper products, food wrappers, and yard trimmings are all burnable products. Sometimes we burn plastic here at the ranch, but we usually try to dispose of that properly in town.

Option 2: Dump My Trash

Here in Mexico trash is a huge problem that is not accommodated by the government (i.e. very few public dumpsters, very little education in schools about trash, and expensive dumping rates). In the US it is more likely to find public dumpsters that you can dump your trash in. If you feel nervous about this, start small. Bring trash to the site little by little. Or dump trash in a place that you have bought a service from, like a gas station. That way you have a right to dump trash and you can fill up your gas tank while you’re at it. 

If you have a big amount of trash, it would be better to go take your trash to the dump. This is the easiest way to go about dumping trash, although it can be inconvenient at times.

Option 3: Turn your trash into treasure!

Upcycling is getting trendy these days, but for us budgeting homesteaders upcycling is a way of life! Plastic soda and juice bottles are a perfect example of upcycling your trash. We recently made the base of our chicken coop and instead of filling the entire base with concrete, we used plastic Coke bottles and other random plastic products to fill it in. Then we used concrete as the filler and the top base. No one would ever guess that inside the base is filled with trash (except for Oscar the Grouch, perhaps). 

Trash is a part of life. There are ways to avoid it, but little wrappers will always sneak in here and there.

Making a solid plan for dealing with it helps homestead life become a little bit easier.

Happy Trashing, friends!