Burning Man and Playa Survival Tips

Mesh Bags!!!!! (from bulk onions/ potatoes /fruit) Hang an old mesh bag in your camp to toss in fruit rinds and other small blowable garbage that will take up much less space and produce less odor in your car once it's dried out. Hang your mesh bag by a stout rope from your car's door handle or some other stationary object, to insure it doesn't blow away (and keep it cinched) Make sure to keep it out of the rain or the trash will rehydrate, make a bigger mess and take even longer to dry out. Then put the dried-out, mummified junk-jerky into one of those white 5-gallon buckets with a lid. You can even compact it. NO MORE STINK!
A plastic bucket with a snap-on lid. (One-gallon size for small camps, 5-gallon for bigger kitchens) If a camp has a kitchen, this is a great choice for compost waste. Holds mesh-averse things like coffee grounds & eggshells, and won't smell up the ride home.. Also a fine way to haul out ashes. Those 2.5 gallon water jugs can also fill in as containers to stow garbage and recyclables if you cut an opening in the top.
Film containers or candy tins make good portable ashtrays. Keep one in your pocket and some at your camp to give away.
A trash caddy/bag to fit into your costume and carry around camp like you carry your water bottle. You can then bring small and larger trash (i.e. your beverage containers) back to your camp after touring Black Rock City. The Port-a-potty is NOT an appropriate place to dump these. You can either make a special individual trash pouch which is part of your costume or use one of those plastic grocery bags as a portable trash collection devise.
Camp Cleanup Tools.- including a broom and dust pan if you have a carpet, Gloves, sponges, and plastic bin for washing dishes,.Cheesecloth for straining dirty water, Vice grips or other tool for pulling up tent stakes and rebar., and pointed sticks (to spear paper trash as it flies by - not to attack other BRC residents!)
Fire Cleanup Tools If you create a fire be prepared to clean it up with the following: A shovel, for shoveling ash,.A large magnet for picking up metal bits from the fire..A rake for breaking and turning over the ground to heal the burn scar. (please see burning tips listed below).

How do I shop and plan for food for the Playa?

Rethink your packaging when shopping for the desert. What you don't bring won't plague you later. Bring items in bulk to minimize packaging If you're bringing a large quantity of food, bring it in a reusable containers. Stock up on a few half-gallon size tupperware containers and leave the cellophane, plastic wrap, excess cardboard and other cruddy packaging at home! You'll have less to lug and plenty to reuse in the end!.
Avoid bringing tons of food (you won't be as hungry as you think) and don't bring food that spoils (you won't be able to keep it iced much beyond the first two days). Meltable foods aren't that great (chocolate liquefies out there) and really, when you do eat, you just inhale whatever it is.
Plan simple meals You don't want to plan to do lots of cooking, because you probably will never get around to it. Bring food that's out of its packaging, in reusable containers, ready-to-eat! Freeze juice in reusable containers. Use in place of ice to cool your food, refresh your palate, and to hold something else after you finish it. Leave that stew at home. Your appetite will diminish in the heat of the desert. Plan light meals with lots of liquid supplements
Eat finger food (burgers, burritos, snacks) that donít need individual plates. If you do need plates and gravitate toward disposable cups and plates, save yourself a headache, and stack em before you toss em.
Bring reusable cups, mugs or glassware, not Styrofoam cups, they tend to blow around and get swept all over the playa. Also recycle melted ice - use for showering, spray bottles, or squirt guns, instead of dumping melted ice on the playa. Wet playa is mud.
Leave your liquor bottles at home. Decant your single-malt scotch into your favorite flasks, or pour those 18 bottles of vodka into a reusable dispenser (it adds a certain mystique to have Limonaya on tap)! Glass is one of the worst problems on the playa, because every little shard of accidentally broken glass must be cleaned up by hand (oh, my aching back). So -- plan ahead, and leave it behind!

What about burning?

It's best to haul it in and haul it out. But if you must burn stuff before you leave, don't burn anything that isn't paper or wood. See, that other stuff just doesn't burn right (couches and rugs, for instance). Also, make sure you do your burning in a barrel or on a surface that protects the playa and won't leave one of those horrible burn scars that have become too common. Plan your burning ahead of time, so your fire is reduced to ash before you break down your camp.You may end up with a few things you would have burned otherwise, but that's better than peeling out leaving a dirty fire burning behind you.
Use camp burn barrels or bring your own burn blanket or corrugated metal to minimize the burn scar and make fire cleanup easier.
Don't burn other people's stuff (especially art!). They spent months putting it together, let them burn it! You can watch and enjoy it with them.
Glass does not burn. Please discourage anybody with a glass bottle from throwing it into a fire. They don't melt. Trust me. That's the worst place for glass bottles.
Don't burn anything that toxic -- you'll regret it later! Avoid burning pvc (nasty dioxins), carpets, plastic, large pieces of furniture (couches, futons, etc.)
Bring fire clean-up tools - A shovel, for shoveling ash,.A large magnet for picking up metal bits from the fire..A rake for breaking and turning over the ground to heal the burn scar. After the fire has cooled down, rake the ashes and pick up glass, metal (magnets are good for this), plastic and other trash that wasn't fully burned, then bag up the top layers of ash to haul home, then rake the remaining surface to spread out the any remaining discoloration.

It's not me, it's everyone else that's leaving traces???

Anoint one member of your camp as your Earth Guardian leader. This person will keep an eye on making sure stuff doesn't blow away to the trash fence or beyond, assure that nothing hits the ground, help to plan your camp's cleanup and break-down ahead of time, handle the question of stinky trash and generally keep people feeling good about how well they are treating the playa. Give this person will a feather-duster, as a symbol of their supreme cleaning authority, so that others can praise them for their playa god/dess status
Promote Camp Togetherness. Get as many people from your camp as possible to take a pledge: "I will give two hours of my time to clean up the Burning Man site at large." You'll be surprised at how much difference this can make. It took a small team of people a little over two hours to clean up the hangover mess around the man last year. BOOM! With a little effort, we can keep it clean, and leave it cleaner.
Work Gloves. It's always a good idea to bring those butch work gloves to the desert to protect your cuticles and fingernail polish. Also, keeping your camp clean is a lot easier, and you will avoid those pesky splinters from giant wooden phalluses.
Playa Virgins If you are camped next to people who are playa virgins, make friends with them! Once you know each other, you can offer to help them clean up, tie stuff down, get garbage bags for Matter-Out-Of-Place (MOOP) and generally make their camp into a better place to hang out. If you don't ever get around to becoming neighborly, just grab as much of that MOOP as you can, before the wind picks up and messes up your nice neighborhood street!

What about walking around Black Rock City?

Personal Trash Devices Wherever you go, carry a person trash device (bag) with you. When you stop by the bathrooms, snag some recyclable cans and drop them off at center camp. Remember: Every time you pick off one piece of trash, you're eliminating the motive for other pieces of trash to accumulate. If you're out on the lonesome range, bring a larger garbage bag. You'll have no difficulty filling it up when you walk along the long orange trash fence, and it will make you feel happy. You'll also get a nice tan, out there in the quiet.
Pink feathers here, blue feathers over there. Avoid walking around wearing costumes that will evolve into litter. The best way to determine whether or not you're going to create litter is to take that costume or decoration and shake it vigorously for a minute or so. If feathers, tinsel, or other things come off, time to rethink that outfit. Some materials to worry about:

1.Poorly attached feathers 2.Tinsel
3.Poorly attached streamers 4.Glued-on Sequins

How do I make cleaning up our camp easier?

Skip the flyers If you want people to participate in your theme camp, skip the flyers - their destiny is litter. Figure out a different way to disseminate your information--rubber stamps, rhymes, jingles and lassoes all work just as well. remember that naked people do not have pockets. And those flyers, well, they fly. Far, far away, to the trash fence. Hundreds of them. And it's not as much fun to hand out fliers as it is to tie somebody up with rope.
Don't let stuff hit the ground - make sure camp items are tied down and throw any nonreusable trash in your sealed trash cans right away. That way you won't have to deal with it later and it won't blow over to someone else's camp. Don't forget that we get big, yes really, really big, winds on the playa - remember those porta-potties last year.
Stay Longer Plan your Burning Man trip to include a couple of days after the burn. This is a wonderful time, when the playa is emptying out again, and the whole social scene changes. People are drawn together in the common work of the cleanup, there are a lot of communal meals and parties, and it's a great time to depressurize and lay-back after all that insanity. Picking trash is very Zen.
Recycle! If you plan to separate out recyclables during the event, and keep passing these on to recycle camp as the week goes on, youíll be lightening your load back home.
Prepare as much food in advance as possible. Carving up meat on the playa results in bones you have to throw away. Plus, you're really not going to want to go to that much effort once you're in the desert. Do yourself a favor and have as much stuff prepared in advance and disgard as much excess packaging as you can.
Make a cleanup schedule or cleanup plan for your camp. Make clean-up a daily fun ritual. Decide when you're going to break camp, assume it'll be about12 hours later, and figure out how you're going to repack all that crap you brought. Generally speaking it's a good idea to leave some extra space in any vehicle on the way up--stuff just naturally expands after being unpacked, and you'll need the extra space, if for nothing else than transporting that very interesting person you met at the opera back to his/her pad ... extra room is a good thing.
Try not to dump liquids on the playa. You'd be surprised at what a stain a bottle of red wine can leave. A 5-gallon bucket with a lid is a good place to tip out liquids . . . keep the lid off and it'll mostly evaporate anyway.
Bring a whole lot of rope, string and weighty objects. One of the most common ways trash gets away is on the wind. So keep everything tethered and weighted down, and the playa won't need so much attention.
Tent Stakes Before you go to the desert, make your own tent-stakes. "Candy-Canes" are by far the safest and easiest, and hold your camp in place the best. Get 4-foot pieces of rebar and an old pipe that slips over it. Bend about 1/3 of the rebar completely over into a candy-cane shape. Now your tent stakes' ends will dive into the playa, making it unnecessary to cover them with markers (although a rag attached to each stake makes them easier to locate and pull during your final sweep). They're easy to pry out, too!
Sweep your camp for every little, last piece of trash. Every twist tie, feather, cigarette butt, sequin, staple, and watermelon seed must be removed. Get the whole camp involved by laying out an imaginary grid, then sweep from one end of each section to the other with a line of people spaced every 6 feet or so.

For More Tips --- check out the Church of Mez and Recycle Camp

Picture below from previous LNT Back Packing Trip