Did Twin Cities residents really once burn their own trash in the driveway?

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When John Wood thinks about the chores he did as a kid in 1960s Minneapolis, one job sticks out.

He and his older brother would take out their family’s household trash and burn it in a barrel in their driveway, he said. His neighbors all did the same thing, sending clouds of stinky smoke into the air.

“What were we thinking?” Wood asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project. “And what finally stopped us?”

Burning trash was common, even in urban areas of the Twin Cities, until the late 1960s. The state created regulations to control air pollution in 1969, making it largely illegal to burn household trash.

Before then, Twin Cities residents like Wood and his brother would regularly “drop a match to a sackful of milk cartons and newspapers,” as the Minneapolis Star wrote when the rules went into effect.

Habits didn’t change overnight, however. And more than 100,000 Minnesotans still use burn barrels in rural areas, according to an estimate from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

In the late 1960s, Minnesota made a major shift away from open dumps and burn barrels and toward landfills and solid waste plans. Recycling and municipal composting followed decades later.

The Legislature created the MPCA in 1967 and gave it the power to control land, air and water pollution. That same year, lawmakers also created the Metropolitan Council, giving it authority to manage solid waste in the Twin Cities area (a task now overseen by the MPCA).

Within two years, the MPCA put new air pollution regulations into effect. The rules included a ban on backyard trash burning — including paper and leaves.

There was an initial loophole, though: It only applied to Minnesotans who lived in an area with trash pickup service (either public or private). The rules gave communities without service three years to implement a pickup system.

At the time, Edward Wiik, the MPCA’s air quality director, conceded that the agency didn’t have the staff to enforce the rules.

He called on county sheriffs to do so instead, saying “we are going to be pressuring the area to stop backyard burning,” according to a Star article.

Violating the ban carried a maximum punishment of $300 and 90 days in jail.

Adherence was far from universal at first. Local politicians pushed back, asking for more time before enforcing the ban.

“I’m ready to report that if these regulations go into effect, the bastille upstairs (the city jail) wouldn’t be big enough to hold ‘em all,” Minneapolis Alderman Joe Greenstein told the Star in September 1969.

Those who supported the regulations, however, were frustrated that neighbors weren’t following them.

A few months after the rules rolled out, the Albert Lea Tribune devoted their regular kvetching column called “Today’s Prime Beef” to “so-called friends, our neighbors, who burn their smelly garbage just at the time we or another neighbor are entertaining company at a patio barbecue.”

Around that same time, the Minneapolis Tribune’s Mr. Fixit column also ran a missive from an upset reader.

“People who are generally pretty nice neighbors are turned into fire-belching idiots. They burn all hours of the day, never tend their fires and generally fill the area with smoke,” they wrote. “I don’t think this is true of our neighborhood alone. Are we going to wait until we have people getting ill from the smog? Just what is being done?”

In 1971, both Minneapolis and St. Paul began enforcing the rule in earnest.

The practice faded away in city and suburban neighborhoods. In the 1980s, state lawmakers passed a statute that gave some farmers an exemption to burn or bury their trash as long as their county didn’t have an ordinance banning it.

A later statute, however, banned the burning of “plastics, chemically treated materials, or other materials which produce excessive or noxious smoke.”

Since that definition applies to most household garbage today, burning it is “illegal in nearly all cases, even if a county has not passed a resolution to ban it,” according to MPCA spokesperson Michael Rafferty. People can get permits to burn plant material or untreated wood, though.

According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research, burn barrels are the nation’s top source of a carcinogen called dioxin, and can also produce carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and a host of poisonous chemicals.

In Hennepin County today, a sizable percentage of residents’ trash is still being burned. Not in driveway barrels, but in a municipal trash incinerator called the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC) on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. For years, environmental activists have been pushing for the center to be closed.

But there is a large difference between burn barrels and professional incinerators — which are subject to state emissions limits and use industrial filters to reduce pollution.

A single burn barrel can send up as much or more dioxin than a full-scale municipal waste incinerator burning 200 tons of trash in a controlled setting, the MPCA spokesperson said.

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