08.01.2026

Fire Was the Solution

When we used to strike a match and light ‘er up!

I paused briefly from book writing at the unexpected bursting in of a recollection. Why it came into my thoughts, I’ll go to shortly, but as with many memories, it brought up the contradictions, humour, and horror we might only recognise in hindsight.

Right up to the early ‘80s, it was near convention for suburban yards to have an incinerator. Often assembled of interlocked concrete blocks, or in the form of a standing half-metre diameter concrete pipe, the incinerator seemed once to have been an indispensable item. Some older incinerators even had a tubular flue, fabricated, ironically, of asbestos! Some folk eschewed a device of any kind, keeping it simple, raking a pile, then dropping a match. Same, same, all…con-fla-gra-tion! Aside from the common domestic yard activities of weeding the lawn, feeding the lawn, watering the lawn, and then mowing the lawn, for many, there was the meditative absorption in regularly setting fire to rubbish in one’s incinerator. Late Autumn, any time through Winter, and through most of Spring, an early evening incineration amounted to a scene of suburban bliss. We were ridding ourselves of our detritus. What a weight off it was, our muck up in flames, our incinerator smoke joining with the incinerator smoke of some nearby neighbour, rising, spreading out. The acrid aromatics of plastics. How conspicuous.

My own experiences with incineration were limited to a short time living at an odd rental property. There, out in the open on a lumpy, uneven—hell to mow—broad and barren yard, stood our incinerator. Ours because it was shared with a wheezy old lady who lived in the other half of the large timber house. Our dividing wall, a flimsy tongue and groove membrane, permitted sounds to invade, like smoke crossing a frontier. Apart from her using fewer allotted incinerator days, I was especially pleased she lived alone, therefore not engaged in the loud and repetitious conversations of the elderly. But I digress.

Why the thought of incinerators came to me I can only assume was the result of having listened recently to an enlightening podcast about the trajectory of our environment. The trigger came on the thought of the word pollution, and how, in the early ‘80s, it was still common for naked flames and plumes of smoke to be present in yards throughout cities.

By the early ‘90s, I’d had the privilege to commence writing and producing broadcast material that promoted everyday personal-actions in an effort to help reduce our collective carbon footprint. While this itself had little to do with incinerators (they had by this time been outlawed), it was still inside the envelope of a time of awakening to the need to clean up our dirty waste habits. Especially in the dense urban landscape.

The environmental campaign ran for more than ten years on a metropolitan television station, simultaneously supported by promotional posters being plastered either side of every exterior train door on the city’s passenger rail network. The market penetration of the message that environmentalism is everybody’s responsibility was plain to see in a ubiquitous on-air schedule. The 24-7 rollout was confidently presented by our eminent and serene evening news identities: their reputational integrity lending an authority to the project. From the perspective of good intentions, the Save the Planet campaign also injected a broad sense of civic advancement into a city’s burgeoning pride as it approached the new millennium, while twirling cranes amidst the skyline held up the reminder of an inexorable trend line: industrial and commercial growth would not be slowed up. The campaign was a success. Whatever the ‘long tail’ of that success might be is difficult to gauge. The idea of handing-off knowledge and wisdom intergenerationally seems to be an equally difficult challenge.

For more than a decade, many had been informed and habituated to seeing the environment differently, learning about waste, about how much of it can be given new life; the logic of re-using, re-purposing, and recycling.

But the generational churn can turn the past away. Some valuable old lessons can become trite to some in the following generation. The garbage bin had recently been replaced by the wheelie bin; a part of progressive global actions to improve our behaviours in the defence and protection of the biosphere’s health.

We had learned fundamentals: separated the used band-aid and tissue from recyclable aluminium, glass, plastics, and steel. After all there remained buildings to build, more bottles to fill, more soft drink to chill… and err, more beer to swill… In the rather simple ask that waste be separated, the sell for some would, it turned out, always be difficult. In that, nothing has changed. The whole project is perhaps a sisyphean task.

Yesterday was the first Wednesday of 2026 and the truck I would usually hear before 6 am was yet to arrive at the top of the cul-de-sac. When it did, the hydraulic claw gripped, raised, and tipped up, and emptied the red-lidded bin, the one for general waste. In somewhat of a habit—I occasionally listen for the sound of garbage falling and landing inside the carrier. In that moment it becomes clear just how much value is still being thrown to the landfill. The crashing of glass and the clatter of steel are the evidence. Too often, the yellow-lidded recycling bin has been left wanting…

Disappointing news is an overbearing feature of environmental reporting. It’s almost impossible to imagine that there could be any good to speak of. But there is, it appears, much more to be acknowledged on the upside of the ledger in the greater environmental endeavour.

As I complete this, heatwaves steal breaths across the southern states of Australia. People are sheltering.

Striking a match in the open is not cool.

You might enjoy this from The Angry Clean Energy Guy

TA

There's plenty more where that came from...