Tips & Hints

Thanks to Garth from the Campground Enviro crew and Toby from the Traffic crew for these great tips and hints on going green at the festival!

1. Plan Ahead and Prepare
For each item that you’re bringing to the festival, think through how you’re going to dispose of it. Have your camp tear-down well planned and practiced.

2. Reduce Your Packaging
Bringing less in means having less to bring out. Leave unnecessary packaging at home, like food items with layers of plastic and cardboard, but also consider the toys and camping gear that you’re bringing. Unpacking them before you get home will spare you the hassle of bringing back Styrofoam packing and shrink-wrap. Choose cans over bottles, and reusable containers over both.

3. Rethink Your Food Portions
Prepare food in sensible quantities that your group can finish at a single sitting – leftovers will quickly become a liability. Coordinate with your campmates as far as what you’re bringing so that you minimize your group’s waste. If you’ve found yourself with a giant pot of chili and not enough campmates, invite the neighbors over rather than creating a wet, heavy bag of waste.

4. Don’t Rush Your Pack-Up
Don’t stress to hurry home on Sunday/Monday. Recognize that long-term exposure to the festival and the elements will fatigue your body and impair decision powers. Also, when under pressure, we are all likely to make rushed decisions, miss details and leave things behind. If half of your campmates will have left already by Sunday, the folks left behind are going to have a lot more work to do. If someone has to catch a plane, make sure to start packing up even earlier than you think you have to, so that you aren’t tempted to leave before fully clearing your site. See more hints from Recycle camp.

5. Litter Sweeps
As you’re packing out your camp, have campmates walk repeatedly around your site picking up anything and everything that’s not part of the site; doing this periodically through the festival will make it easier.

6. Do Not Use the Bush as Your Toilet
It’s unacceptable, unsanitary, and just plain gross the morning after.

7. Take Your Bikes Home
Do not leave behind your old bikes behind for us. We still have to dispose of them if you don’t, and that’s an expensive and time-consuming effort.

8. Be Aware of Very Small Items
No Trace really does mean no trace. Be conscious of spare nails or smaller trash particles that may be dismissed as too small for trash including: hair, matches, cigarette butts, feathers, plastic tie wraps. Remember that food waste such as peanut shells, orange peels and egg shells are also trash. While you’re walking around the site, make an effort to pocket all trash, including cigarette butts, and then empty your pockets into a trash bag later. After you pick up your trash to carry home, do a last-minute check of your site for cigarette butts, gum wrappers, glow sticks etc. because many of those will be hidden under tarps, tents and vehicles.