Waste avoidance when camping
Do you like to go camping or experience outdoor adventures and don't want to harm nature unnecessarily? Very good attitude! We have therefore collected our best tips in the HÄNG team on how to avoid waste outdoors easily.
#1 Preparation is really all
Disposable dishes and bottles account for most of the waste. To avoid this, we recommend solid preparation. To replace disposable tableware, you can get mess kits/gamelles, for example. In general, however, before we buy something new, we would take a look at eBay classifieds or borrow it from a group of friends. It is important here, the things too return. (Marco, yours HANG you'll really get it back next week, I promise!)
Take a thermos bottle with you for drinks or get a 5L water bottle in the supermarket beforehand. We try to keep our returnable bottles with us at camp at all times and reuse them when the opportunity arises - for example to wash the dishes or do a cat wash.
Whilst we are on the topic of washing: it has proven useful for us to put the detergent and the detergent in a (waterproof!) Filling a Tupperware can/bottle, making sure everything we dump on the floor is biodegradable. To wash ourselves, we use solid soap and solid shampoo. To do this, simply wet the soap, rub it in your hands until it is foamy and you will be perfectly clean.
Also useful: take your cooking equipment with you! A pan and a pot are often enough. This should be able to replace the aluminum foil when camping in particular. Recently, the serviette has long since given up. We try to have a cloth with us everywhere. You can use it several times and then simply wash it off with warm water.
#2 Shopping
We discovered the joy of cooking a long time ago and therefore avoid pre-packaged meals. This saves an incredible amount of packaging waste and tastes even better! We try to buy fruit and vegetables without packaging as far as the offer allows. We always take it with us in a small cloth bag. Another companion for us when shopping is a large backpack so that we don't have to take paper or plastic bags with us. That's doing particularly well BEG. In any case, the entire purchase fits in and it is protected from the rain.
If you have the opportunity, we can also warmly recommend unpackaged shops. Of course, they are not available everywhere, which is why we have to use a few tricks here. For example, you can look around for Turkish supermarkets in your area. There are large packs of rice up to 20 kg. You can then pour it into a Tupperware can and take it with you. Do you have any tips on where to get bulk packaging or how to avoid packaging altogether when shopping? Share them with us Instagram!
By the way: To make coffee, you can buy ground coffee in the supermarket or, even better, from the local roaster and prepare the coffee on site with a French press. Recipe? With pleasure!
For a whole jug (500 ml):
- Bring water to 95 degrees. (Blow the water, remove from the plate and wait 5 minutes)
- Pour 8 tablespoons of coarsely ground, medium-roasted coffee into the pot. Pour the water on top and stir.
- The stamp with the sieve on it, press down slightly and wait 4 minutes.
- Slowly press the stamp all the way down.
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Pour the coffee into your favorite cup hammock lay down and enjoy the morning!
#3 In case you do create garbage
If you do create garbage, that's okay. The important thing is not to leave him lying on the floor. So take a few garbage bags or a small bucket with you, despite your zero waste goals. This also applies if you are planning your own camper van conversion. From our own (painful) experience, we can recommend that you install at least one rubbish bin in the bus. We would also recommend that you make sure that animals cannot get to the bucket on their own, for example if you have a dog with you as an outdoor buddy.
It is also important to separate the rubbish properly, especially on campsites. This is also relevant for the operators, because in many places the waste is not even picked up unsorted.
Those were our tips! If you have another brilliant idea on how to avoid waste during outdoor adventures or want to have more of this topic, check us out on Youtube and Instagram.
