A Low Waste Camping Guide
When we head out on camping trips, we are usually visiting provincial parks or preserved areas. The whole goal is to get out of the city and reconnect with nature for more than just a few hours. While camping is a great way to do this, often people generate a lot of waste on camping trips.
Without the conveniences of a fridge, recycling, or composting facilities, we tend to opt for a lot of single use items to make being out “in the wild” a little easier. However, visiting these natural locations makes it even more important to keep our waste as low as possible. It seems a little backwards to go out into nature and produce more waste, right?
So here are a few ways that I have found help to keep your camping trip as low waste as possible:
1. Pack out what you pack in.
Wherever you are going, if there aren’t garbage or recycling bins, you need to bring your waste with you until you can find a proper place to dispose of it.
We got a bag for the outside of our truck that was used to keep smellier items outside the vehicle. So, all our recycling and garbage stayed in there until we found a place to get rid of it. Finding recycling for cans and garbage bins was easy on our trip and we were able to clean those out at least every other day, but we held on to our cardboard for 5 days before we found a cardboard recycling bin. (I would have kept it the whole trip and brought it home if we hadn’t found one)
2. Pack bulk dried foods
Before we left on our trip, I bought all our dry good in bulk to reduce packaging waste. Lentils, quinoa, pastas, and oats were all zero waste staples for our meals. I also made my own oatmeal mix and a batch of granola before we left so we had easy, healthy, and zero waste breakfasts throughout the trip.
Camping with glass jars is not ideal, so I transferred most of the items into reusable plastic containers or stasher bags to save space and weight in our vehicle.
Fun fact a jar of pasta or lentils from Jarr delivery fits PERFECTLY in a stasher bag!
3. Make your own snacks
The week leading up to our trip I also made several snacks to take with us. This helped us avoid single use packing for things like granola bars, but also having a lot of dietary restrictions it is near impossible for me to find granola bars that I can eat, especially in small towns.
Recipes from Pick Up Limes Blog
I recently discovered the blog Pick Up Limes and made 3 recipes from it. Having breakfast bars, and two different power balls were great to have. I packed them in reusable containers and kept them easily accessible in the truck for snacking.
4. Cook meals from scratch
Apart from a few meals eaten out on the trip, we cooked all our meals from scratch. Dehydrated prepackages meals have their place when you are backpacking, but when you are car camping it is so easy to avoid that packaging and cook much better tasting meals.
Meat is one thing that is hard to avoid packing for. We froze some in stasher bags before we left which lasted a few days. Halfway through the trip we went to a local butcher shop to restock. Buying from a butcher shop not only means you can buy ethically raised, grass fed meat, which I always try to do, but it also packaged in wax paper instead of Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap. Not a zero-waste option but a lot better if you are choosing to eat meat.
Buying sausages from a butcher is also a better (and healthier) alternative to hot dogs.
5. Ditch the single use dishes
We invested in enamel plates and bowls for camping, and each had a spork for the trip. Every meal we cooked we ate on these and we avoided paper plates and single use cutlery, washing everything after every meal.
For drinks we also both brought our Keep Cups, these served multi purposes, for coffee and tea in the morning, to beers or gin and tonics in the evenings. You can take any reusable mug you have from home, no need to buy special camping mugs.
Another low waste win was bringing my metal tea strainer, with a few small jars of loose lead tea, and a little jar of honey. We couldn’t compost the tea leaves but were able to avoid single use tea bags that are individually packaged.
For coffee we had an Aeropress and brought coffee beans from home that were ground with an old-fashioned had grinder.
6. Bring reusable containers
I bought 2 sets of the LightMyFire container sets that are make from bioplastic (plant-based materials) that can be used as a bowl, and plate or a container, and each came with a spork. We used these to pack sandwiches most days or a mixing bowl or measuring cup. They also come with two smaller containers which fit inside the main one for compact storage. There smaller ones came in handy for snacks, or leftover items like half a package of sausages or half an onion that we kept in the cooler.
Because they are light weight, they were great from throwing in our bags for zero-waste lunches during the day.
I also brought a few plastic containers on the trip, we used these to put in the meat from the butcher shop and store any leftovers we had to keep everything dry and organized in the cooler. Stasher bags were also an essential for packing snacks on our hikes.
7. Use biodegradable soap and reef safe sunscreen
If you are doing dishes at a campground, it is important to use biodegradable dish soap (I would recommend you do this even at home) but especially if you are near a body of water. I just brought some of mine from home in a jar. I also bought some reef safe sunscreen in a recyclable metal tube for the trip. If you are going to be swimming, any sunscreen you are wearing will come off in the water and will impact anything living in that ecosystem. So keep the fish and you skin safe by using reef safe sunscreen.
8. Buy second-hand gear when you can
There is so much secondhand camping gear out there! Try borrowing gear from a friend of if you are a regular camper then check out Facebook Marketplace, craigslist, or a second hand sporting goods store.
I bought this chair off marketplace, and bonus you save so much money buying used!
9. When you are buying new gear, look for sustainably made options
I always looks for sustainable gear when I can. I paid a little bit extra for this tent as it is made from recycled materials.
10. Find refill shops if you are near a town
We stopped in Courtenay B.C. on our trip and after a few days we realized that we had not packed enough dish soap. Luckily Courtenay has a great little refill shop, and we were able to buy some bulk soap in a jar to get us through the rest of the trip.
Later when we were in Ucluelet we also stopped at one of my favourite shops, The Den, and stocked up on a few items. One of which was bulk natural bug spray.
So many small communities now have refill or bulk stores, if you need something and are passing through somewhere take a minute to google what is near you before heading straight to the grocery or drug store.
There were a few items that we were unable to avoid producing some waste:
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, we were not able to compost on the trip. Had we only been away for 2-3 days I would have kept our compost in a container and brought it home with me. However, we were away for 9 days, and this option was not feasible, especially being in some areas with bears.
We bought 3 bags of ice throughout the trip. Again, if it had been a short trip, we would have used reusable ice packs, but the longer trip did not make this possible, so we bought a few bags of ice to keep our food cold. One thing I would recommend is getting a good cooler. A bag of ice cubes would last 3-4 days in our cooler which reduced the number of bags we had to buy. Also remembering to empty the water from the melted ice every day helps to keep the remaining ice frozen (and your food dry!)
A few food restock items came in packaging since there weren’t bulk stores in a lot of the small towns, but by bringing a lot of dry bulk foods from home this was minimal.
No camping try is perfectly zero-waste, but these above can help to reduce waste and keep our parks as pristine as possible for everyone’s enjoyment.