*/

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Day 258 - Monday 9/15/08

Today's Haul:

  • 1 cardboard box from veggie burgers - recycle
  • 1 plastic bag from veggie burgers - recycle
  • 1 plastic bag from bread - repurpose
  • 1 plastic marshmallow bag - recycle
  • 1 pile of old wood - burned due to termites*
* So i was clearing out some old stuff in the back and found these old saw horses that have been there forever.  They weren't treated (they were here when we got here) and had become completely termite ridden.  My first thought was that there was no way they were going in the basement.  As I was getting ready to weight them and take them to the curb, I noticed how infested they were an wasn't too psyched about dropping these guys all the way to the front yard of the house, and eventually having them work into the outside of the house.  So i decided to burn them in our chimenea (a friends idea).  While I'm sorry to have burned the termites, I didn't know what else to do.  The kids brought out marshmallows and we toasted them after the fact so at least it turned into something good for them.  As for the pollution aspect, the CO2 is the same (I'm assuming ) since they'd break down in a landfill eventually anyway, but i wonder what else was released.  Like I said, they weren't treated so no chemical from that.  Either way, an isolated incident and I'm going to list it anyway.

4 comments:

Denis said...

I don't know how good of an idea it is to expose any kind of food to the smoke produced by an old, termie-ridden (and, presumably, mold- and spore- ridden) wood object.

I've looked at the rest of your blog and the Time.com article on it, great stuff.

Dave said...

Hey Denis,
Thanks for the concern. I thought of that too, so we waited until everything was burned down to the coals and then toasted. I figured anything scary was carbon by then.

Dave

arcticcircle said...

Probably better to burn untreated wood than put it out on the kerb or compost. Release of carbon dioxide is much better than release of methane (23 times as potent) from anaerobic decomposition.

Dave said...

Hey hungry,
Can you post a link toa source for that info? Interesting.

Dave