Comment by Animats

15 hours ago

There's a machine for this, and you can rent it - the Barber Litter Picker.[1] It's a large tractor-pulled machine, like an agricultural implement. It's a variation on their Surf Rake, which is used for beach cleanup. The Litter Picker is built for dirt, hard ground, grass, and pavement. It's used for large outdoor festivals. Scoops up everything from cigarette butts to lawn chairs. Video of cleanup after a big festival.[2]

Big festivals are cleaned up in a few hours with this heavy equipment.

[1] https://www.hbarber.com/litter-collection-equipment/litter-p...

[2] https://videos.files.wordpress.com/IxQgz6Oo/lp-concert-jiffy...

9 comments

Animats

Reply
ghshephard  13 hours ago

You are getting a bit of grief down thread- but this is cool as all get out.

The best use of these systems would be to combine the various procedures:

First, and foremost - don't leave garbage behind in the first place. Think twice before bring sequins and feathers in costumes (the biggest culprit in my experience from 2003-2010). Film cannisters for cigarette

Second - Every Camp does a combination of complete-grid clean up on their own "lot" - I've done that three times - and it was honestly great - plus an hour of "community time" - where you walk the play off your lot and clean it up as well. Your camp packs off 99% of the garbage, and then a grid search, plus heavy rake, finds the last 1%. About the only debate my camp ever had was whether it was acceptable to just dump their potable water onto the Playa (I thought it was fine - as long as you didn't just pour it all in one place - within 15 minutes you would be hard pressed to ever find out where it was poured out).

Third - the two-week "walk the line" where the detailed MOOP maps get created. 150 people for a 80,000 person 7+ day festival seems entirely reasonable - and it's a big part of BRC.

Finally (and I really mean do finally, it's almost a thing that shouldn't be really visible) - show up with the heavy gear to find all the submerged stakes/rebare/moop). Just rake the hell out of the Playa (absolutely fine - I've never understood people who think that it's a problem - it really isn't - you sure as hell aren't going to disrupt any ecology - except for a few random sand-fleas - it's entirely devoid of any life) - and the first bit of rain completely and 100% eliminates any trace of what you did.

hobofan  3 hours ago

> Scoops up everything from cigarette butts to lawn chairs.

From some of the videos you can find of it on Youtube, the cigarette butt claim doesn't look believable. It can definitely leave smaller debris behind, and certainly won't pull lag bolts out of the ground.

beAbU  15 hours ago

Did you read the full article?

The whole point of the manual cleanup duty is the meticulous mapping of MOOP. This information is used by the community to learn and improve for next time. This has resulted in measurable improvement over the years, despite the event growing massively in size during that time.

I feel a big commercial machine that cleans the site up in a couple of hours will result in a community that does not espouse the 'leave no trace' principle. Because why would you care? A big machine is going to clean it all up anyway.

  • tgtweak  15 hours ago

    You can definitely add some telemetry to this that records and analyzes realtime location to "map" the litter, even when using a device like this. The conveyor actually seems very well suited to an external camera that records and analyzes the mess to a degree that should be suitable for the purpose of "recording" litter types and concentrations based on the location, without resorting to manual sweep/dust bins which actually sounds pretty insane at this scale.

  • Animats  15 hours ago

    Right, needs a drone pass for mapping before and after cleaning.

    Needing 150 people for weeks to clean up is too labor-intensive. Are they paid?

    • sevg  14 hours ago

      You’ve missed the point. This is a cultural commitment not a logistics problem to engineer away.

      The person you replied to did kindly try to explain to you, but you seem to have ignored it.

      If you don’t understand the culture of Burning Man, that’s fine. But maybe don’t callously reduce 150 peoples’ labor of love to “btw just use this machine”.

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