How to get rid of unwanted items in Minecraft

After playing Minecraft for a while, you will quickly gather loads of items and blocks. However, not all of them will be useful to you in most cases. The number of items in the inventory and chests will exponentially increase in a matter of hours from the time you start playing, and soon organizing all your possessions can become cumbersome. Hence, you must frequently get rid of unwanted materials.

The tough part is that when an item is dropped, it does not despawn for a very long time. This causes the world to be littered with discarded junk that you threw away simply because you had no use for it. Luckily, there are better ways to deal with worthless items to clean your inventory and make room for more competent resources.

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Ways to get rid of unwanted items in Minecraft

Creating trash can with lava or cactus

Lava and cactus are perfect for destroying Minecraft items in an instant (Image via Mojang)

Either you can leave the items you dropped alone for a long time so that they despawn from the world or use lava or cactus to instantly remove them. These are two blocks in Minecraft that are capable of destroying any thrown-away item that comes in contact with them, except netherite ingots and other netherite gear.

Hence, one way to get rid of unwanted items is by creating a lava cauldron or a cactus trash can so unnecessary materials can be thrown into it. As soon as the discarded object touches the hitbox of these blocks, it will instantly get destroyed.

It's worth mentioning that you can even create a redstone operated trash can with lava. Simply place useless items in a chest and the hoppers, and the dispensers will automatically drop them in a magma pit.

The only downside to this method is that you will not get anything useful out of it since the item will despawn from the Minecraft world. It is advised to use this method only for things that serve absolutely no purpose.

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Trading with villagers

Cleric villagers can buy rotten flesh for emeralds in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

A much better way of disposing of unwanted items is by trading them with different villagers. These passive mobs can be professionals with different jobsite blocks and are capable of buying various items with emeralds. If you have certain items that are useless but can be traded for emeralds, find a villager that will purchase them instead of throwing them away.

For example, you will have loads of rotten flesh after fighting a horde of zombies, and it might be useless to you. However, a cleric villager will pay a good amount of emeralds for them. The same goes for items like paper, sticks, etc. This is why it's necessary to always check with the villager's trading list before throwing away an item.

Moreover, you might not find a good way to use gold ingots in the beginning since they are not the strongest when it comes to using them for gear. However, they are excellent for bartering with Piglins in the Nether realm. If gold ingots are burning a hole in your chest, use them to get other items from the mob.