Changing campers’ approach to waste
There’s no escaping rubbish, even on one of New Zealand’s most popular Great Walks.
Zero waste advocates Hannah Blumhardt and Liam Prince were dismayed to see campers throw foldable camping chairs, tarpaulins, an inflatable mattress, a tent fly, plastic buckets and reusable shopping bags into a skip during a 15-minute period at the Totaranui campsite in the Abel Tasman National Park.
‘‘They were filling it up every day, at a huge cost to the campsite – that was quite shocking in a way,’’ Prince said.
This year, the Department of Conservation has made changes to how rubbish is managed at the popular campsite, adopting a ‘‘pack it in, pack it out’’ approach to waste.
There will no longer be a skip bin on site, and campers will be required to take their rubbish with them.
When Blumhardt and Prince walked the Abel Tasman Coast Track in January 2018, they set out to do so without generating any rubbish.
‘‘We aimed for zero waste, and the only thing we came out with was food scraps to compost,’’ Prince said.
The couple have been living a zero waste lifestyle for three years, but it was the first time they had attempted to spend four days tramping without producing any rubbish.
Prince said a lot of the waste associated with camping and tramping was ‘‘convenience-based’’, and it required a bit more planning to work around this.
The night before they left, Prince and Blumhardt did a lot of food prep, making muesli and muesli bars, crackers and bliss balls. They decided against taking a portable cooker with them, and instead cooked grains in advance and took sprouted lentils in a mesh bag.
They didn’t have access to a dehydrator, so took fresh vegetables, which added a bit more weight.
‘‘We used various strategies to basically avoid taking anything with us that was packaged.’’
The principles of waste reduction were the same across the board and were useful in any situation, Prince said.
‘‘Virtually every aspect of life has some kind of waste associated with it.’’
He said the best way to work out how to reduce your waste was to go through your bin and work out where the rubbish was coming from.
‘‘We kept an eye out for rubbish that was on the track and in the national park itself, and the vast majority of stuff we found was muesli bar wrappers and snack food wrappers.’’
While in the Abel Tasman in January, they spoke to those staying at the Totaranui campsite about what they could do to reduce their waste while camping.
DOC Takaka operations manager Dave Winterburn said that since last summer, the Totaranui
‘‘The onus is a bit more on the campers to be more responsible, a little bit more environmentally friendly.’’
Dave Winterburn, Takaka operations manager, Department of Conservation
campsite had made changes to the way it managed rubbish, and would no longer provide a skip for campers.
‘‘It is a simple approach. It came from the staff, as they were experiencing a huge amount of rubbish.’’
The campsite is the biggest in the Abel Tasman. Winterburn said that during the height of summer, there were up to 850 campers there each night.
He said the amount of rubbish being carted out of the campsite each day was unsustainable.
‘‘Instead of providing rubbish facilities, we are asking people to be more considerate of what they bring . . . the onus is a bit more on the campers to be more responsible, a little bit more environmentally friendly.’’
Winterburn said campers were notified of the changes when they booked, and would be sent a reminder a few weeks before they arrived.
Food scraps would be collected by staff each day for composting. The camp was aiming to be zero waste by 2025.