LNT--What to do with TP

I’m not sure anyone has calculated it in quite those terms. I don’t double-bag—single ziplock seems adequate. And I almost always pack it out, because it just seems like most places anymore have too many users to decompose it. What’s more, even buried TP tends to get dug up and dragged out by critters, so your best efforts could fail to keep it underground long enough to decompose.

If you do bury, I suggest getting TP that’s means for RVs. It breaks down faster (of course, mostly because it’s thinner). And you might need to mix it into the, er, organic matter, which can gross out some people.

In remoter areas where camps sit vacant between users, and where it’s wet enough to break it down, fine. In some of the Sierra places we just were, I think we’re on the cusp of either having to install backcountry outhouses or require a “pack it all out” approach. It was hard to find a place to dig a hole at 10,000 Island Lake, because they’d all been dug already (and too many had just stacked rocks on top of their deposits, but that’s a whole other issue).

I pack mine out. I keep my toiletries in an Eagle Creek nylon zip pouch with two plasic baggies. One baggie contains my unused TP along with some hand sanitizer and the other is used for soiled TP. I put the used toilet paper in one of those doggie poop bags, tie it shut and put it in one of the plastic baggies. Then put it in the nylon zip pouch. Never even know it's there.

I dig a cathole, and burn the TP before burying it.

Some parts of the Indian Peaks see heavy use, but there are a few areas that are less frequently visited. I'd be perfectly OK with a cat hole in those places.

I've just gotten to the point of packing the tp out in all cases. Once I began bagging the tp where required, it seemed like an easy enough thing to do consistently.

Like others, I always pack it out.

About single-use plastics... Here's how I think about some of these types of issues wrt backpacking: I'm only backpacking a small number of days per year. If I'm concerned about plastic consumption, and I act to reduce mine during the rest of the year, then if LNT concerns cause me to use an extra baggy a few times a year to pack out my TP, my overall impact is still greatly reduced, since my non-backpacking days so greatly outnumber my backpacking days.

I apply that same logic to nutrition, etc. If I eat pretty well on my non-backpacking days, then I can pretty-well eat whatever I want without concern on my backpacking days. And so on.



I'm definitely NOT asking for any more information about this statement.

I haven't backpacked in some time so I pack it out dayhiking. Boondodcking if I have a fire I will burn it and any TP mines I might find. The last two summers saw an alarming increase in the number of TP mines out there.