Rick Crawford
In last week’s Part 2: Plastic-Free Camping in Everglades National…Groceries I provided some tips to eliminate single-use plastics while doing your grocery shopping. This week I am going to focus on how I tried to eliminate single-use plastics from my camping gear.
The reason I wanted to see if I could go single-use plastic-free camping is because plastic pollution is becoming a serious threat to fisheries around the world and I want to use my blog to create more education and awareness about plastic pollution. Additionally, Everglades National Park is one of my favorite places on earth and is a truly unique place with a wonderful fishery and I wanted to draw more attention to the gross mismanagement of Florida’s water resources. Check out this video from Orvis to learn more, and please visit: www.gladesdeclaration.org and sign the Now Or Neverglades Declaration!
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Single-Use Plastic-Free Camping Gear Checklist
As far as camping gear goes, I have a Mountain Hardwear tent made from polyester and nylon, and an old L.L. Bean sleeping bag made from cotton flannel and polyester. Polyester and nylon are both forms of polymer made from plastics, but my tent and sleeping bag are not single-use plastics. The reason I bring this up is that I do think there is a place for durable and long-lasting goods made from plastic, however the real problem is single-use plastics. Below are some pics of ways we avoided single-use plastics with our camping and fishing gear:
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- Reusable Cups, Plates, Cutlery: Using reusable cups, plates and cutlery eliminate the need for single-use plastics and create less waste.
- 7-Gallon Water Container: Definitely a game-changer in terms of having plenty of water and no need for plastic water bottles and very economical. There was enough water for 2 people for 3 days of camping and fishing. You can pick one up by clicking HERE.
- Ice: Another way we reduced single-use plastics was to freeze some drinkable water and which served a dual purpose as both ice for the cooler and cold water to drink when needed. This is especially good for the food cooler as it doesn’t sweat and leak into food.
Eliminating single-use plastics from my camping gear was relatively easy compared to the the groceries, which consisted of what would have been a lot of plastic packaging. That said, I did buy 4 bags of ice to keep the coolers with our beverages cold. As I mentioned in Part 2, I am certainly not perfect and did the best I could to eliminate single-use plastics, but fell short due to needing more bags of ice as it took us two days to drive down from Charleston and didn’t buy beer and pack the coolers until we arrived in Flamingo in an effort to save as much ice as we could.
Anyways, I hope this information is helpful and if you have any other tips, please feel free to comment below!