What's All the Fuss About "Leaving No Trace?"

To some, LNT stands for something very specific. For others, there mere thought that you would pay hundreds of dollars to attend an event of some sort and then you still need to clean up all your own trash, cigarette butts and all -- and (many times) no trash cans to be seen anywhere in the scene. So, before I say it all wrong, we begin our mini-series on "LEAVE NO TRACE," starting with the following from Burn.Life ...


LEAVE NO TRACE

You've heard this already, no doubt, but do you understand what it really means and why it's so important? What does it mean? "Leave no trace" literally means that - leave no discernible trace behind after the event, to all extents possible (sometimes nearly impossible). The only way this works is if each camp and each camper in that camp is responsible, completely, for their own waste, right down to that pistachio shell on the ground or that bit of clothing lint....or god forbid a feather. (Seriously - they're cautiously allowed out there these days but you're risking your life if certain Burners catch you molting onto the playa.) Why is it so important?

LNT is perhaps the most important of the principles Burners are roughly guided by because failure to follow it has a very formal and defined consequence: our inability to continue holding the event on federal land. The Black Rock Desert is federal, and is managed by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), to whom the Burning Man organization must provide satisfaction that it has indeed left no trace after the city shuts down for the year and disappears. If we fail that test, we will fail to get a permit to build the city. It's pretty amazing when you think about it. The Black Rock desert is a blank canvas, with nothing to hide or obscure trash besides the ground itself, and yet 70,000 people manage to collectively gather and clean up after themselves like civilized adults. After we all leave, a group of hardcore volunteers stay and literally search every single inch of ground that we touched to find whatever we left behind. So, not only do we need to LNT in order to keep having Burning Man there, but if we don't, volunteers have to clean up after us. That would make us assholes. Let's not be assholes!

Tips and Tricks for Leaving No Trace

1. Don't drop things on the ground. Simple as that. Control your shit.
2. When you leave your personal campsite, sweep every square inch of it, picking up everything that wasn't there, down to the splinter size. If it's visible, get rid of it. (Now you see why glitter is the mortal enemy of the playa!)
3. When your camp leaves its campsite, do a line sweep, meaning you walk through it while walking close to each other in a line, to make sure you miss nothing. Do it twice!
4. Remember, no grey water - water you've washed with, cleaned with, showered with, etc - should touch the playa. There are a bunch of options for getting rid of grey water.

Garbage Minimization
Because you need to pack out your trash, it behooves you to consider how you're going to manage your trash during the week - cans, paper towels, baby wipes (for you to clean dust off yourself), bottles, water jugs, and so on can really start to take up space and there are no garbage bins to put them in.

Burner ShiftyFox has some great recommendations:

 "If you do the trash system the right way, you can go home with almost nothing left and make a little money in the process. So here I am going to share with you beautiful people, my ideal form of a Burning Man trash system that works really great.

• Have a container for burnable trash such as paper and food scraps, etc.
• Have a container for recyclables such as glass and plastic.
• Have a separate container for recyclable aluminum cans.
• Have a container for non burnables such as plastic items, wrappers, plates, utensils etc.
• Another tip: Burner Matt Smalley recommends color-coding your bins and putting signs on them so you spend less time digging through your trash later to separate stuff that went into the wrong bin/bag.  Collapsible laundry baskets work well.
• Unwrap everything at home. The less packaging you bring, the less you have to deal with while there.

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Now toward the end of the week you can take your burnable garbage to a number of burn barrels and dispose of it there. Or you can do like we do and have your own fire pit in camp and just continuously put your burnable refuse and food scraps here, and burn it nightly throughout the week.

Now also at the end of the week you take your recyclable aluminum cans to this lovely camp here: http://burningman.org/.../infrastructure/recycle-camp/and that takes care of that. Maybe even volunteer to can crush for an hour if you feel so inclined.

Now all that is left to take back with you is non burnable garbage and your glass and plastic recyclables. When you get to Reno there are a number of places that will pay you good money for your glass and plastic recyclables. Boom! Money for the gas tank.

Now all you are really left with is the non burnable garbage, which really amounts to almost nothing if you did this system correctly.

I hope this helps."

-ShiftyFox

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Thanks ShiftyFox! That does help! You're not nearly as sketchy as your name suggests, despite my previous bad experiences with vulpine con men.

(origionally posted at http://www.burn.life/leave-no-trace.html)