Burning Man reveals the worst trash left behind after a rocky year |
FILE: Dusk settles on the Playa during Burning Man 2025.
In a recent blog post, the Burning Man Project unveiled the most common types of trash — referred to as MOOP, or Matter Out of Place — left behind by festivalgoers in 2025. The worst offender? Lag bolts, the coarsely threaded screws that some Burners drill into Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to secure their canopies and tents.
Volunteers found 2,304 lag bolts, tent stakes and pieces of rebar embedded in the hardened mud this year, an increase from 1,508 in 2024.
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For three years straight, lag bolts have been the most common form of MOOP. Other common items in 2025 included miscellaneous plastic debris (volunteers found 1,204 instances) and pieces of cardboard and paper (826 instances).
“Lag bolts are highly effective for anchoring objects into the playa,” playa restoration leader DA, the author of the blog post, writes. “But when screwed flush into — or below — the surface, they disappear into the dust. Overlooked, they become both a leave no trace failure and a safety hazard for vehicles and people.”
Every year, after the last Burners pack up their campsites and drive out of the Black Rock Desert, the real work begins. A team of 150 volunteers, known informally as “resto” — short for “restoration” — spends several weeks scouring the 157-million-square-foot area for trash.
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Sometimes, the resto crew takes drastic measures to clean up the landscape. After 2023’s rains turned the playa into a muddy mess, volunteers used a compression roller to steamroll hardened tire tracks.
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“Leave No Trace” is one of Burning Man’s 10 Principles, the set of guidelines that inform the event’s ethos. It’s as much a practical consideration as it is an ethical one: Burning Man takes place on public land within Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and must pass an inspection by the Bureau of Land Management after each year’s festival.
The BLM inspects 120 sites on the festival’s grounds. If 12 or more of those sites fail the agency’s requirements, Burning Man risks losing its privileges to use the desert for future events.
Last year’s festival was a rocky one for Burning Man. The weekend before many attendees arrived, 50 mph winds battered the event, knocking over its famous Orgy Dome and several other camps’ structures. Heavy rains softened the desert’s surface to the consistency of thick oatmeal. Against this backdrop, one man was killed, and one couple had a surprise birth.
Despite these unusual circumstances, Burning Man comfortably passed this year’s BLM inspection, which took place in October. Just seven of the 120 sites inspected failed to meet BLM’s standards.
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In the blog post, DA advised Burners to tag their lag bolts with heavy duty tape, and to scour their campsites with metal detectors during MOOP sweeps.
DA also shared the event’s annual “MOOP Map,” with red dots indicating where the most debris was left behind.
Burners’ cleanup efforts left the vast majority of Black Rock City “remarkably clean,” a spokesperson for Burning Man Project wrote in a statement shared with SFGATE. The spokesperson advised that Burning Man participants perform multiple shoulder-to-shoulder line sweeps when cleaning their campsites and double-check for small pieces of debris.
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“With 70,000+ people building and then removing an entire temporary city, it’s remarkable what the community achieves together, and the MOOP Map helps ensure we continue to raise the bar on leaving the Black Rock Desert in a better state than when we arrived,” the spokesperson wrote.
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