Camps have always been places where young people connect with nature, build life skills, and develop a strong sense of community. This tradition stretches back to 1861, when Frederick W. Gunn founded the first organized camp in Washington, Connecticut. His vision was simple yet profound: take boys into the wilderness to cultivate physical skills, self-reliance, and respect for the environment. This philosophy laid the foundation for American camping, blending outdoor education and environmental stewardship.

By the early 20th century, as camps spread across the United States, this ethos deepened. Programs teaching “leave no trace” and sustainable living became central to the camp experience. Campers weren’t just taught to enjoy nature — they learned to actively care for it. Many early camps modeled resourcefulness, repurposing materials, and conserving limited resources, leaving an imprint on young minds that would shape their attitudes for years to come.

This connection to nature is more than a nostalgic notion — it’s a responsibility. Camps are uniquely positioned to model sustainability, a role that is increasingly important in today’s world. According to a survey published in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership (Larson et al., 2023), 74 percent of parents believe camps should encourage children to protect the natural environment, while 52 percent think camps should minimize their own environmental impact. These expectations reflect a growing awareness that camps have the power to influence habits and attitudes far beyond their grounds.

Modern Sustainability Efforts at Camps: Progress and Challenges

Today’s camps are embracing sustainability with the same pioneering spirit that shaped their history. Many are taking significant steps to align their operations with their values. According to the same survey (Larson, et al., 2023):

• Forty percent of camps actively focus on waste management, integrating practices like recycling and composting into their daily routines.
• Thirty percent prioritize sustainability education, teaching campers hands-on lessons about conservation and environmental responsibility.
• Twenty-seven percent engage in natural resource and wildlife conservation, ensuring the ecosystems surrounding their grounds remain vibrant.
• Seventeen percent implement energy and water conservation measures, such as solar panels, low-flow fixtures, and energy-efficient appliances.

These efforts inspire and educate campers through direct engagement. For instance, many camps distribute reusable water bottles and thermoses to reduce single-use plastics. Gardening programs teach campers to grow vegetables or native plants, managing food waste through composting. Creative projects like upcycling waste into art reinforce the idea that sustainability is practical, rewarding, and achievable.

Still, there is significant untapped potential: 60 percent of camps expressed strong interest in learning more about how to make their operations more sustainable. This highlights both a willingness to grow and an opportunity to provide camps with resources and actionable strategies to close the gap between intention and implementation.

The Reality of Single-Use Food Service Items

While camps have made strides in waste reduction and sustainability education, mealtimes often fall back on using disposable, single-use items — compostable, recyclable, or otherwise. The challenge is that even the most well-intentioned single-use items often fail to deliver on their promised benefits.

• Compostable items. Without industrial composting available, most compostable items end up in landfills, where they emit methane — a potent greenhouse gas — as they decompose.
• Recyclables. Single-use recyclables, such as paper cups with plastic linings, are often nonrecyclable due to food contamination.
• Environmental costs of production. Manufacturing compostables and recyclables requires significant energy, water, and raw materials, contributing to environmental degradation.

The fact is that any single-use material is unsustainable. The relentless manufacturing to produce a product that is only meant to be used one time is inherently problematic. Plus, even with improved recycling and composting processes, single-use items still create a lot of waste we need to dispose of after the fact, versus a reusable solution that doesn’t create volumes of waste in the first place.

Why Single-Use Persists in Camp Settings

Day camps, in particular, may find single-use place settings a practical option due to their shorter schedules, limited staff resources, and lack of infrastructure. Several barriers drive this reliance:

• Labor constraints. Proper sorting and processing of single-use items requires time and staffing. Seasonal staff often lack the training or bandwidth to ensure items are composted or recycled correctly.
• Operational simplicity. Disposables offer convenience by eliminating the need for washing, storing, or managing reusable items. For camps with limited staff and packed schedules, this simplicity is a compelling reason to stick with single-use meal ware.
• Short-term cost perceptions. Compostable and recyclable items may seem cheaper in the short term, even though waste hauling fees and landfill impacts add up over time.

Unfortunately, the use of disposable packaging undermines the sustainability message that camps strive to teach. A disconnect arises when gardening or conservation activities are followed by lunches that generate bags of waste. This not only sends mixed messages, but it also misses an opportunity to integrate sustainability into one of the most routine aspects of camp life — mealtime.

Reusable Solutions for Camps

If a camp has its own washing facilities, labor, and durables that can meet its needs, then the concept of reuse is already integrated. Many camps in this situation still may not be exploiting those lessons nor providing moments of learning and pride around the impact they are making by choosing to reuse.

Other camps may operate in rental facilities (such as parks or temporary spaces) or without dedicated kitchens or dining services. For these camps there exist solutions that provide comprehensive support for switching to reusable dishware and accompaniments with minimal disruption and upfront cost. These sorts of services have seen wide success in schools, corporations, and event spaces, and would certainly adapt well to camps. Some examples include:

• Schools. Districts like Berkeley Unified in California have replaced single-use trays with reusables, reducing cafeteria waste and teaching students responsibility.
• Corporations. Companies such as Google and Patagonia use reusable dishes in their cafeterias, reinforcing their sustainability commitments and saving money over time.
• Event spaces. Venues such as New York’s Javits Center integrate reusable place settings into large-scale operations, tracking and communicating their environmental benefits to attendees.

Here’s how reuse solution providers help facilitate the switch from single-use to reusable items in a camp setting:

• Dishware supplied on demand. Durables — often in the form of reusable plates, cups, and containers — are supplied on demand according to a camp’s needs. Often these programs charge on a per-use basis, eliminating the need to purchase high volumes of reusables.
• Camper engagement. After meals, campers simply make sure to return their reusable items to designated return bins — an easy, tangible way to practice sustainability.
• Hassle-free cleaning. Many services will handle collection, washing, sanitizing, and redistributing dishware to camps as needed, simplifying operations without adding workload.
• Impact tracking. Some services offer real-time sustainability data on waste diversion, emissions reductions, and water savings, helping camps measure and celebrate their progress.

A Meaningful Step Toward Camp’s Waste Reduction

Switching to reusable dining ware makes a huge environmental impact. Consider a camp with 500 campers and staff where each uses a cup, a 6x9 sandwich container, and a 5x5 container for dessert every day. After eight weeks, this one camp will have diverted 84,000 items from ending up in landfill and made the following positive environmental impact simply from having lunch:

• Diverted 3,128 pounds of trash
• Avoided 7,364 kg of carbon dioxide from being emitted — the equivalent of taking 596 cars off the road for a day
• Saved 14,054 gallons of water — the equivalent of over 200 bathtubs of water

A Meaningful Step Toward Modeling Camp Goals

The impact adds up quickly, but the benefits of switching to reusable dishware and other items are about much more than reducing waste — they are about embracing the values that make camp special. At their core, camps are about community. Whether it’s singing songs around a campfire or working together on a ropes course, campers learn to share responsibility and work toward collective goals.

• Hands-on education. By participating in the process — sorting reusable items or tracking their environmental impact — campers gain practical experience in sustainability, internalizing habits they can bring home.
• Community building. Using shared resources fosters a sense of collaboration and responsibility. Campers and staff work together to make sustainability a part of camp culture.
• Enhanced reputation. As more families prioritize sustainability, adopting reusables positions camps as leaders in environmental responsibility, appealing to eco-conscious parents and potential partners.
• Shared responsibility in action. Campers sorting reusable plates and cups after meals internalize sustainable habits through small, consistent actions.
• Real-world lessons in sustainability. Reusable systems track and communicate their environmental impact, showing campers how their daily choices contribute to measurable results.
• Strengthening community bonds. Using shared resources like reusable items fosters a sense of collective ownership and mutual accountability, reinforcing the idea that sustainability is everyone’s responsibility.

Camps as Leaders in Real-World Change

Camps have always been more than just summer retreats — they’re incubators for values that ripple outward into families and communities. By adopting sustainable practices like reusable meal ware and utensils, camps not only reduce their environmental footprint, but also inspire broader cultural shifts.

Research has shown that children can significantly influence their parents’ environmental behaviors. A study in Environmental Research Letters found that environmental education for children not only increased their own knowledge but also positively impacted their parents’ understanding and household sustainability practices (Damerell, Howe, & Milner-Gulland, 2013). When campers learn to use refillable water bottles or reusable plates, those habits extend beyond the campgrounds. Parents notice. Schools hear about it. Communities adapt.

Every reusable plate, cup, or container at camp carries a powerful message: small changes, shared collectively, can create a ripple effect that transforms not just camp communities but society as a whole. Reusable dishware services empower camps to focus on what they do best — building community and inspiring environmental stewardship — while seamlessly integrating sustainable practices into daily camp life.

Photos courtesy of Sunbury Urban Farm, Columbus, OH; Camp Fire Alaska's Rural Alaska Program, Anchorage, AK.

References

Damerell, P., Howe, C., & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2013). Child-oriented environmental education influences adult knowledge and household behaviour. Environmental Research Letters, 8(1), 01501.

Larson, L. R., Rivera-Zuniga, J., Garst, B. A., Keith, S., Sudman, D., & Browne, L. (2023). “Going green”: Investigating environmental sustainability practices in camp organizations across the United States. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 15 (1), pp. 94–100.

Caroline Vanderlip grew up in camp, having spent five years at day camp, followed by eight years at sleepaway camp in Maine. In 2020, Caroline founded Re:Dish, a reusable dishware service that helps institutions seamlessly integrate reusables into their existing operations, exposing thousands of people to daily reuse behavior. Coming full circle, Re:Dish was founded, like camps, in Washington, Connecticut! To learn more about how Re:Dish can help your camp ditch single-use items, send an email to [email protected] or visit redish.com