Burning trash was once required in some places
When I lived in Southern Indiana in the 1960's the trash guys would NOT pick up ones trash unless it was burned. It was considered good practice then to burn locally and reduce the volume that goes in land fills.
Everybody had 55 gallon steel drums behind their houses on a city alley.
Unless one's stuff was burned, they would skip your house.
Thus everybody burned all one's household trash in these 55 gallon steel drums, that had a few holes on the sides at the bottom. One loaded the drum so stuff would burn easier, more air-ey and fluffy burnable stuff on the bottom. When packed well one would get a roaring super hot fire and radically less bad stuff in the air.
One had to plan burning so it was done and cooled down before the trucks came. If you can was still hot you got skipped too.
A favorite dirty
prank was to thrown in somebody else's fire some aerosol cans and they would explode and one got fly ash all over the place, often on somebody's clean clothes on a clothes line. Thus while burning one kept watch for pranksters.
In that era one had deposits on cola bottles, few used paper towels or disposable diapers, there was less junk mail, few ate out and had bags and cups from McDonalds. Folks also repaired things more too. Ones volume of waste was radically less than today. Some folks even did the WW2 thing of saving old steel cans and steel beer cans for the scrap too. Or one saved old glass bottles and brought them in as scrap too. There was not a recycling guy then. Radically less consumer items were plastics too.
