Burning Man wants revelers to stop pooping on the playa

Jenny Kane | Reno Gazette Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Watch: Burning Man's anything-goes (and temporary) city The annual Burning Man event centers on building an almost-anything-goes city in the desert for just a week.

RENO, Nev. — While poop bags for Burners might sound like a far-fetched Shark Tank pitch, instead it's a proposal to prevent revelers from leaving their waste scattered on the desert during this year's Burning Man celebration.

At Burning Man, making it to a bathroom in a timely manner might be difficult for a number of reasons: Your zipper on your giraffe costume might be busted or a 100-foot-tall, 100-foot-wide dust devil might be in your way.

But the most common reason Burners are not making it to the white throne appears to be that they find themselves marooned at a lit rave in the "deep playa."

The deep playa is an area of the event relatively far from the center of Black Rock City, the pop-up city in the Black Rock Desert that lives during the festival, and often far from banks of portable turquoise toilets. Often, some of the loudest parties migrate to the deep playa so all 80,000 people at Burning Man won't be forced to listen to pulsing electronic dance music until sunrise.

► July 14: Burning Man organizers: No fences around major burns this year

► April 28: Burning Man founder Larry Harvey dies after massive stroke

► March 28: Burning Man sells out 26,000 tickets in a half hour

In a recent report, the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that oversees Burning Man, expressed concern about the number of folks pooping and peeing in the deep playa. Although the Black Rock Desert is a barren dust flat in Northern Nevada, about two hours north of Reno, making a doo doo in the middle of the flat is still a big "don't don't."

BLM agents this year plans to park "mobile rave zones" nearer to Porta Potty banks and place signs in the zones to remind partiers to use the toilets, according to the BLM report. Burning Man volunteers and staff already "search for and quickly clean up human waste deposited during deep playa music events," but the agency suggested that volunteers and staff also "hand out or ask Burners to bring pee bottle and poop bags for camp and deep playa events."

Teaching toilet etiquette is nothing new to the Burning Man organization, which last year provided 1,700 Porta Potties at the event, which has taken place the week before Labor Day since 1991.

► March 10: Burning Man art displayed at the Smithsonian through Jan. 21

► Dec. 7: Burning Man wants permission to grow to 100,000 people

Even some of the Burners that do use the toilets still manage to misuse them. The staff who clean the Sharpie marker-covered plastic loos have to clean out anything that's not single-ply toilet paper or human waste.

In years past, retrieval efforts have surfaced a mattress, a full roast chicken and thousands of cigarette butts and baby wipes. Though a dirty job, it's vital for the Burning Man organization to leave the desert spotless since it is a federally protected national conservation area.

The Burning Man organization also is guided by 10 principles, including "leave no trace." Leave no trace is a common outdoor mantra as well, encouraging people to pack out whatever waste that they bring into or produce in nature.

Burners call litter of all types MOOP, an acronym for "matter out of place."

Follow Jennifer Kane on Twitter: @Jenny_Kane

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