Funkcamp - Burning Man Clean-up Plan - 2009

Our leave no trace plan consists of three parts: Reduction of waste materials prior to heading out to the playa, a trash and recycling system during the event, and thorough clean-up and site sweep at the end of the event.

Pre-event

Before we even reach the playa we will be reducing waste materials in a number of ways by eliminating any packaging and combining items into fewer, reusable container. This works for water, alcohol, food, and any other new items which will be brought to the playa.

During the event

First off we have a never let it hit the ground mentality. We keep our camp clean as we go so as to reduce the amount of work we need to do later. We will also have a trash and recycling system that will be comprised of a central garbage, burn-ables and recycling area with containers for each of these items scattered about camp. The garbage collection will be screened on the bottom to collect liquids which will be evaporated along with grey water.

Three times each day we carefully walk the camp collecting any moop left by other participants and move it to the trash, burn-ables or recycling. Recycling is separated into its various components (glass, plastic, metal) and either bagged up for packing out or brought to any camps serving as a recycling center. Burn-ables will find their way to our burn barrel each day while garbage is bagged, stacked and prepared to be packed out. For a camp of our size we have found that we have remarkable little garbage each year.

Post-event

At the end of the event we begin breaking down camp. We move any burn-ables to the burn barrels, collect more trash and recycling and deconstruct our structures for reuse. While we collect trash as we go, we do our most detailed inspection once all our structures and gear are taken apart and put into our vehicles. Once this is done we form a human chain across the width of our camp and go inch by inch picking up an moop. We repeat this process with a smaller group but generally find that most of the moop gets found and moved to the trash.