Eco Trip to Burning Man

Every year in the last month of August, the Burning Man Project creates a temporary city in Nevada’s Black Rock desert with over 40,000 attendees from all around the world. A makeshift city is built to withstand the harsh desert winds, dust and heat of the ancient lake bed. By the last night, the fifth largest city in Nevada is burnt down and in less than a month there is no trace of human existence. Earth 911 staff member Jason Ayers offers eco-friendly packing tips that can also be used by campers and hikers.

Preparing for the journey to Burning Man is a lot like going into outer space, except that you need much more survival gear in the desert. This being my fifth year attending, I now have supplies down to the essentials: Parachute covered shade structure, solar powered generator, water and bicycles. Everything else, like clothing and food, is just to make the visit more comfortable and enjoyable.

I had about two months to really prepare for this trip. The more time I put into planning my visit the less I have to spend cleaning at the event. In a town with zero garbage cans or recycling bins, every individual is responsible for hauling out whatever trash they create. Recycling is a big deal there and is used to help local communities. Minimizing the amount of product packaging you take is more of a challenge than it first seems. Keeping trash to a minimum is important since high winds can easily send paper trash flying for miles.

My girlfriend and I started preparing by shopping for bulk items. We avoided products with excessive packaging, individual serving containers, small water bottles and glass bottles. Even with “green shopping” in mind, we still ended up with quite a bit of extraneous cardboard, plastic and shrink wrap on our hands.

Once back home, we removed everything from its exterior packaging. Delicate items were placed in reusable sandwich bags or used shopping bags. Its amazing how many of the food items reduced down to only half a container.

Sometimes excessive packing serves a purpose. For example, when I unwrapped some curry flavored Cup-o-Noodles from their shrink-wrap-cardboard-sleeve-combo and got a strong smell of curry. We quickly decided these would be best put into a baggie to avoid making curry flavored cookies.

Speaking of Indian food, I assumed that the camping-friendly Tasty Bite I bought in bulk would be just the food packets. Instead, it was packed with individual cardboard boxes for each item.

It took about an hour to remove everything from their boxes, wrapping, bags, sleeves and blister packs. That’s one extra hour we get to spend on our vacation and two less garbage bags we need to haul back 780 miles to Phoenix.

Look for my post later this week from Burning Man. I’ll be writing about how we recycle and deal with gray water in the desert, all while have fun doing it.