If you’ve been burning your trash and raked leaves in a charred, 55-gallon drum in the backyard, it’s time to find another way.
On Wednesday, New York environmental regulators banned such burning statewide, closing the gap in a patchwork of local restrictions and out-of-date state statutes.
Not so long ago, burning trash was the norm, whether in building incinerators in more populated areas or in tended fires in more open spaces.
You can still have your backyard campfire, whether ceremonial or for food and warmth, but the rest of that pyromania is taboo.
God knows there’s a bit of the fire-tender in all of us. It goes back to when fire was tamed and can be as relaxing as it is warming.
The problem is, when people get to put whatever they want into fire, it ends up creating health problems that don’t show up as quickly as smoke in your nostrils when the wind changes.
Primarily, this statewide ban is focusing on dioxins and other chemicals that float up with the smoke and end up messing up lungs and a host of other organs.
What happens typically is backyard fires aren’t that hot. Sure, they’ll burn you and all, but compared to the 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit that burn plants reach, they’re mild.
Put plastic water bottles into those little fires and they’ll melt in a real cool way, but what’s melting is actually being carried into the atmosphere and ultimately into our bodies.
“These regulations are long overdue,” said Laura Haight of the New York Public Interest Research Group. “Since 1972, the state has prohibited open burning in communities with populations over 20,000, but burning trash has continued to be a common practice in many less-densely populated, rural, parts of the state.”
Haight said our waste stream has gotten more toxic and consequently so have the fumes that come when some of it is burned.
She calls it a “witches brew” of polyvinylchloride, or PVC, and other types of plastic, treated wood, batteries and even bleached and colored paper.
David Carpenter, a professor at the SUNY Albany Institute for Health and the Environment, says the major source of the cancer-causing dioxins in New York is backyard burning.
“Twenty years ago it was incinerators,” Carpenter said. “That changed with that ban.”
Carpenter said dioxins aren’t something that humans would make intentionally. It’s produced anytime anything with chlorine is burned below 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit .
“It deposits on vegetables, on the grass that cows eat,” he said. “It’s a very nasty substance. It increases the risk of cancer at any concentration. We must get dioxin out of the food supply.”
Since open burning is the largest cause of wildfires, the new restrictions should help on that front as well.
As someone who watched the side of a hill next to his house catch on fire one afternoon many years ago, I can still recall the terror when that little barrel fire almost raged out of control.
I thought I was on top of the situation until a moment of inattention showed me I wasn’t.
Who doesn’t love the smell of burning leaves or a backyard burn?
With the leaves changing color, this time of year has always had its own smell because we thought there was no problem doing what we’ve always done.
Now it’s clear that we can’t keep doing that.