How do I permanently destroy blocks in Minecraft?

I have been digging a mine and now have a slew of dirt and cobblestone blocks. How do I destroy them permanently and keep them from filling up my inventory?

Solution 1:

You have a few options:

• Throw them into a pool of lava
• Throw them into a cactus block
• Throw them into fire
• Explode them (items will be destroyed if they are in the radius of a TNT or creeper explosion)
• Just throw them on the ground and forget about them and they'll despawn after 5 minutes. This is generally longer than desirable, however, which is where the other options come in handy.

Solution 2:

You should always keep cobblestone...It's used for a ton of stuff in various forms. You can smelt it into rock, make it into stairs, roads, and, of course, huge fricking floating palaces with skulls that drip lava, etc.

Gravel is useful for mining flint, so keep it, then throw it in a hole and mine it again, and again, and again, until you've converted all of it to flint.

Dirt is pretty annoying, granted. I tend to keep it because I'll occasionally want to level a lot of terrain in preparation for building something. It's also nice to use in building elevated roads/bridges, because you don't have to use the more valuable cobblestone. I like to use dirt for "lighthouses" (really tall towers with torches on top so you can see where things are) and other disposable structures.

Chests are super cheap to make, so there is no reason not to throw the mined dirt/stone/cobblestone in chests whenever you go back to base to make more picks/shovels.

Solution 3:

There are a few basic ways to ditch this stuff:

• Throw them into lava (my favorite)
• Set them on fire by other means
• Just drop them somewhere and leave them, they'll despawn after 5 minutes
• Throw them on some cacti! (Thanks @Raven Dreamer)

Did I miss any?