Our Garbage-free Van Build
Building a mobile home to reduce garbage.
Our home on wheels was built with garbage-free living in mind from the beginning. We’ve learned, from living in our stationary home, this type of lifestyle takes a bit more planning. We expected needing a plan to combat even more garbage on the road. Travel is centered around convenience and where there’s convenience, you’re likely to find single-use plastic and processed ingredients.
A few of our van’s garbage-free components:
Solar Panels: What better source than free energy from the sun? It wasn’t so great in Washington state with all the cloudy days, but perfect for Southern U.S. and Mexico. The solar feeds our marine deep-cycle battery to run anything inside the van–fan, lights, fridge, and cooking appliances.
Refillable Water Tank: No single-use plastic water bottles for us! And a much cheaper option for water. Our 5 gallon clean drinking water tank can be swopped out at gas stations or grocery stores when we’re traveling through Mexico or at potable water sources while camping.
Vent Fan: We cut a hole in the ceiling for a vent fan to keep us cool at night and circulate air while cooking. No need to waste gas running the van for AC–this gives us great airflow for sleeping.
Pump Faucet for our Sink: This addition keeps us intentional with the amount of water we use. We only pump out the amount of water we need. Having a sink gives us a place to clean re-usable dishes and stay away from single-use dishware.
12V Fridge: We decided to invest in a fridge instead of a cooler to avoid the cost of ice and the amount of single-use packaging that goes with it. We’re excited that it doesn’t use a lot of power and keeps food fresh for longer, avoiding food waste. We invested $187 in an Alpicool model, which is much cheaper and more efficient than similar models.
Window Covers: We made our own custom window coverings from reflectix (A reflective insulation that can be found at Home Depot.), magnets, and gorilla tape. Custom window coverings are an option but you’ll end up paying a fortune and these homemade covers work great! They double as privacy and heat blockers–keeping the inside of our van much cooler while soaking up rays into the solar panel.
Power Inverter: Our power inverter gives us the ability to plug in our Instant Pot (our most prized garbage-free item) and hot plate for cooking. Most places we see while traveling–fast food chains, convenience stores, and some restaurants–are filled with single-use items and processed foods so having the ability to cook reduces waste, fills our bellies with healthier foods, and keeps costs lower.
Vehicle Tune-up: Yes, we realize we’re traveling in an older van that uses fuel and isn’t the most economical but we’re doing the best we can with what we have and the amount of money we could spend. Before leaving on our travels we gave our 1989 Conversion van a tune-up with a goal of improving fuel efficiency. Some of the items on our tune-up list: installing a new air filter, fuel filter, and transmission filter, putting in new transmission fluid, replacing spark plugs, spark plug wires, distributor cap and rotor, cleaning fuel injectors, and swopping out the fuel pump.
Someday, when we can afford a more economical option, we plan to upgrade. Electric VW van, here we come :)
We’ve been extremely happy with the build and even more so with the amount of garbage we’ve reduced due to our planning!
If you’re interested in doing something similar, we’d be more than happy to help! Our consulting fee is determined per project so send us an email (meg@thegarbageawarenessproject.com) to start collaborating. We’d love to be apart of your garbage-free van build!
