Factorio Forums

TL;DR

There are few -vanilla- ways, and with 0.17. even less to get rid off burner inserter, spaghetti-poles and such.

What ?

We were used to be able to use wooden-chests and small electric poles as fuel, this is as in 0.17 removed. We usually build plenty of those, and other stuff (like burner inserters, etc.) quite a lot.
We also do not have any way of re-using them or upgrade them, nor the ability to simply "destroy" them. We need bullets and shoot them stashed in a wooden chest, or carry them for the rest of the industry life.
While the stone-furnace has somewhat of reuse, since it is ingredient for some parts, the inserter, miningdrill, electric poles do not have any use.

A suggestion would be, that the wooden stuff will be fuel again, to have at least some "rewarding" way to get rid of them instead of just destroying them.
Other stuff, like burner inserters, either a "assembling machine" recepie, to upgrade them - make them an ingredients wouldn't be good.

A mod, that helped me out and appears to be quite popular, is the "reverse factory". While it yield the crafting mats, it is also kinda imbalanced (good way to increase transportation-density), so havin' a look into this would be nice.

Why ?

Once we knew how the game will be after some hours, we started to manage our first setups

• no more than 30 stone furnances
  • to not exceed the 40 boilers
• re-use the 1 buring inserter you start with as often as possible
  • since these are neither convinient nor reusable in any way
• no wooden stuff
  • 1. Small electric poles
    2. wooden chests
  • these are not burnable anymore

And, aesthetic matters - it would improve the big picture quite well.
Change the "Destroy and replace" mentality into evolvement.

I'll lazily link to a post of mine that basically answers this question of "getting rid of old stuff without putting it in a chest and blowing the chest up".
viewtopic.php?p=405798#p405798