I am curious, what is your opinion of being able to burn your garbage instead of sending it off to the landfill? We used to live in the country, where it was legal for us to do this, but since we live in the city, we cannot do it anymore. I have to talked to some people that say it is worse to burn it because of the pollutants it puts in the air. I have also talked to people that want to move out to the country just so that they can do these sort of things. Just curious.

hmmm, I live in a small town, and people love to burn stuff. Since we recycle almost everything, our only garbage is some kinds of plastic, and dust and drier lint. Drier lint is a good fire starter.
I don't know which is the lesser of two evils, because burning plastic is obviously polluting the air, but the alternative is to bury it and pollute the earth. It's a catch 22. The best thing I guess is to use less.
We don't burn our garbage because it would stink, but it is legal to do so here.

i cannot wait for the day when i get my own place and i can make it the most environemtaly friends place i know.

I think that incineration is a good solution. For those of you who don't know, that is where they burn your trash and then use the energy from burning for things like electricity. I took a waste management class a couple of years ago and a group of us were assigned to do this big research project where we actually visited an incinerator and did this big presentation and stuff. They have standards about the amount of air pollution that is given off by this process and they have solutions such as scrubbers and other methods to vastly reduce the pollution given off.

Off the top of my head I can't remember what the current air pollution standards are in Long Beach, CA (where the plant was) but obviously they are fairly stringent.

I know that incineration isn't too popular at the moment, but maybe in the future it may be a good solution. I guess this is burning garbage on a large scale. :) I just know that landfills are disgusting. We visited one of those too and got the tour and everything and the amount of trash they bring in there is amazing. It really opens your eyes to the amount of waste we generate.

You should reduce wast to a minimum and don't burn it yourself.

Waste burners, burn the waste at a high temperature so toxic stuff is broken down as good as possible.

If you burn it yourself (in the open) the temperature of the fire is too low for that.