alt Hacker News> degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it
Right, but that's not happening, because people are dumping in Reno so someone else has to handle it :p
I'm a bit confused by how you said "provided." This may be a USA Burn vs regional Burn misunderstanding - it sounds like the USA burn has a larger divide between Organizers and Participant? For Japan / Taiwan, if there's communal trash, that doesn't mean trash is provided, it just means we organized group trash handling, increased ticket price if necessary, added voluntary shifts to pick up around a dumpster or whatever.
The organizers are also participants, but yes, there is a large overarching Org that manages the overall infrastructure of the city and that certainly isn't every participant. It's not realistic to expect 70K people to all band together to organize and negotiate contracts for large scale shared services like toilets and medical and things like that that end up costing millions in actual money changing hands, not to mention things like coordinating with the government for the permit and regulatory requirements, dealing with the numerous law enforcement agencies on playa, managing the airport, running the DMV, running Burner Express buses, etc., especially when these things need to be planned out way ahead of time. For a small scale event, sure, that can work, but it doesn't scale up in any reasonable way. So when I read communal trash, I'm thinking of a scenario where the Org has to contract with and pay a few million dollars to a waste management company to haul out a lot of dumpsters to the desert and haul them back to civilization to dispose of garbage, with a corresponding increase in ticket price and an increase in the problems that I mentioned before. For camp-led garbage disposal, I don't think there's anyone necessarily against that on a small scale, and sure, neighboring camps in theory could band together to come up with a solution together, but at the end of the day that adds a lot of coordination and complexity on top of an already complicated logistical nightmare. Camps are welcome to use outside services on the approved list to come up with something if they wish. It sounds like you haven't been to the Burn if your reference is Japan / Taiwan - you should go (it's a wonderful time) and I think you'd understand pretty quick why what you're suggesting wouldn't really make sense at that scale.
Here's the list of approved providers:
https://burningman.org/black-rock-city/preparation/infrastru...