Free tool
Leave No Trace Impact Score
Honest answers about your last trip, scored the seven principles.
Answer the seven questions
— / 21
All calculations run on our servers from the values you enter — nothing is stored.
Please note — This tool scores environmental habits only. It does not assess trip safety, fire legality or local restrictions — fire bans, protected cultural sites, closure notices and species protections vary by park and season, and the signs and rangers on site always outrank any generic score.
Almost every camper believes they travel lightly. The evidence at the sites says otherwise. The ring of black stones around a new fire, the fruit peel by the picnic table, the walk-up track that started as a shortcut to the creek. Not out of carelessness — out of not knowing which specific habits leave marks, and which old ones have quietly been retired.
This tool converts the minimum-impact ethic into seven questions you can answer in a minute. Where do you pitch, and what leaves with you? What happens at the toilet and the creek? How do you cook, and what do you do with your food and the animals? How do you treat the other parties, and how big is your own? Each answer scores zero to three, the total lands out of twenty-one, and every point you lose names its own fix.
The scoring follows the seven Leave No Trace principles as Australian parks agencies interpret them. The same guidance printed at park entrances from Kosciuszko to the Flinders. Where practice has moved on, the tool has moved with it. Burying scraps is a hundred-year-old habit worth zero points now, and the reasons are honestly surprising the first time you hear them.
Take it before your next trip and again after. The score is not a grade; it is a list of the specific things you can stop doing this weekend.
How the seven questions score
Every question maps to one of the seven principles, and three of the seven do most of the environmental damage when answered badly. Site choice decides whether the ground recovers. Waste decides whether animals change their behaviour around people. Human waste and washing decide whether the creek downstream stays swimmable.
The other four — fires, wildlife, consideration and party size — score the same arithmetic but with different weight in different places. A stove in a total fire ban year scores its full three points on safety alone. A big group spread across four established sites barely registers where a tight bunch of five on one fresh pad scars the ground for a season.
Answers earn partial credit because real camping is a spectrum. Packing out most of your rubbish is genuinely better than burying it and calling it compost. And the tool knows the difference between a habit you are improving and one you have abandoned. The fixes list at the bottom treats every point the same, though: each one is a thing you could be doing instead.
A worked example
The family beach camp answers honestly. They pick a firm sand flat well back from the waterline — durable ground, but fresh, so it scores two, not three. The rubbish bag goes out full, the toilet paper gets bagged, the washing happens in a basin two hundred metres from the dunes and the food lives in a locked esky. Four full marks in a row.
The fire is where the marks leak. They light saved picnic-table scraps in the communal ring, which is legal and sensible and scores a two for using an existing pit. The music is off but the kids' football carries across the dunes to the neighbouring sites — a two on consideration. The group of eight pitches as one block on that one open stretch of sand: one point.
The score lands at sixteen of twenty-one — low impact with gaps. And the fixes list is still four lines long, because sixteen is not twenty-one. Single-file on the dune path, split the block across two existing areas, quiet hours at dusk, and a stove instead of the ring are worth the small effort. That is the whole design of the tool: the last points are the ones nobody gets without being shown.
Getting an honest score
Answer for the last real trip, not your best one. The camper who books pads all year but once buried an orange peel at a beach stop has, on the evidence, buried an orange peel. Memory flatters; the questions are written to catch the exception rather than the rule.
Run the tool as a group, around the camp table, before the drive home. The arguments it starts are the useful part: whether the scraps actually matter, whether the shortcut across the dune is already a track. Those conversations change next trip's habits more reliably than any brochure.
Score your regular site type specifically. A high-country walker, a beach-weekend family and a 4WD desert tour have different pressure points. And a tool answer of three for fires in one country can be the wrong gear choice in another. Where your next trip differs from your usual, run it again for that trip's conditions.
Reading your band and your fixes
Nineteen to twenty-one is a light footprint. You are doing the full modern standard and the remaining points usually hide in the least-visible habits, like sound carry or single-file travel. Fifteen to eighteen is solid with gaps, and the fixes list points at them directly. Most campers in this band can close the distance without buying anything.
Ten to fourteen is the mixed band, and it is the honest answer for a lot of good, old-school campers. Nothing in it is scandalous; nearly all of it is habits that were standard fifty years ago and that the ecology of the campsites has since outgrown. Take the top three fixes and re-run next trip; the climb from twelve to eighteen is usually two changed habits.
Below ten is a heavy-impact pattern, and the tool says so without ceremony. The good news at the bottom of the scale is that the cheap wins are enormous. Packing out rubbish and pitching on existing ground alone can double a score. Because those two habits carry most of the actual damage at most Australian sites.
The one-question upgrade
If you change nothing else this year, move scraps and peelings from the bury column to the pack-out column. Buried organics take years to break down in Australian soils, wildlife dig them up anyway. And the habit is the single most common scoring leak in this tool.
What a score of 21 does not mean
Perfect marks describe habits, not outcomes. A group doing everything right still compacts soil, still drops light and noise, and still adds traffic to a site that has a limit. The score measures the decisions you control, and twenty-one means you are choosing the least-damaging option at every step. Which is the entire ask of the movement, not a claim of invisibility.
Local rules outrank the general standard. Some parks require packed-out human waste, ban fires entirely, or close the very sites this tool rates as existing and durable. The guidance here is the baseline where nothing stricter applies, and the park's own signs are always the higher authority.
The weighting is deliberately blunt. Three points per question treats site choice and party size as equals, which any ecologist would qualify. Real impact depends on species, soil and season. The bluntness is the point: it keeps the tool as a checklist of habits rather than a fake-precision index. And the fixes each dropped point names are the useful output, not the number itself.
The formula
Impact score = sum of seven principle-based answers, three points each, out of a perfect 21
- 3 points
- The habit that matches current minimum-impact guidance for Australian parks and country.
- 1–2 points
- The common compromise — right in some places, wrong in the one place it matters.
- 0 points
- The old habit that parks agencies now ask visitors to stop, from buried scraps to feeding wildlife.
The scoring at a glance
| Score | Band | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 19–21 | Light footprint | Full modern minimum-impact practice across every habit |
| 15–18 | Low impact, gaps to close | Good camping with one or two visible leaks |
| 10–14 | Mixed | Old-school habits, mostly retired ones doing the damage |
| 0–9 | Heavy impact | Start with waste and site choice — the biggest two levers |
| — | Local rules | Any park requirement overrides this baseline, both ways |
Key terms
- Minimum impact code
- The set of visitor behaviour rules Australian parks agencies publish, which closely mirror the seven Leave No Trace principles.
- Durable surface
- Ground that shrugs off tents: established pads, bare rock, sand and gravel. Everything else — moss, cryptogamic crust, heath — is fragile.
- Cat hole
- A small dig, fifteen to twenty centimetres deep and sixty metres from water, for human waste where packing out is not required.
- Cryptogamic crust
- The living skin of mosses, lichens and soils that holds desert and alpine ground together. One tent can break decades of it.
- Habituation
- Wildlife learning to connect people with food. It is the real cost of scraps and feeding, and it almost always ends badly for the animal.
Pro tips
- Keep a single small rubbish bag that goes home full, even from a booked site — the habit removes the whole waste question from every trip.
- Choose the boring existing site over the beautiful fresh one; the tool's site question is the highest-damage decision most campers make.
- Carry a trowel and a paper bag for cat holes in one kit, so the good habit is the easy habit.
- At dusk, ask the site nearest yours how the noise carries — you will hear the answer before they say it.
× Common mistakes
- Burying peelings and coffee grounds, which wildlife dig up and which break down far slower than campers assume.
- Spreading a big group across fresh ground instead of crowding onto one established area.
- Moving firewood from region to region and shipping pests with it.
- Raking a pristine corner into a new fire ring because the old one was a metre away.
Frequently asked questions
Why does burying food scraps score zero?+
Because in most Australian environments organics break down far more slowly than the old assumption, native animals dig them up and eat human food. And the peel ring around a camp is the visible mark of a decade of campers. The modern standard across every parks agency is simple: everything that came in goes out, including the orange peel and the coffee grounds.
Is a campfire ever the low-impact choice?+
Sometimes. On cold high-country nights a fire is a genuine warmth and morale layer no stove equals. And an existing raked pit with dead fallen wood scores close to the top. The honest answer is that a stove scores three everywhere, at any temperature, in any fire ban, with no ash to carry out. So the fire is the trade you make knowingly, not the habit default.
Do these principles apply in a booked campground?+
Yes, at a lower intensity. Rubbish still leaves with you, washing still stays away from the drain. And the generator and the speaker still belong to the hours everyone else chose. The site choice question flips to a different answer in booked country. Use the pad you are given and pitch well back, because the impact there is already designed in and paid for.
What is the difference between Leave No Trace and the parks' minimum impact codes?+
Very little in practice. The seven Leave No Trace principles are the international framework. And Australian agencies publish the same ideas as minimum-impact codes with local specifics like native species, fire rules and cultural-site protection. The tool scores the shared baseline; the state-specific extras usually make the strictest answer the right answer anyway.
Can a big group ever score well on impact?+
Yes — the question scores decisions, not headcount. A dozen campers spread across established areas, travelling in loose single-file pods and sharing one kitchen site can beat four people wandering a fresh heath to give themselves space. The two answers that lose the marks are crowding untouched ground and one tight clump of bodies and tents on a single pad.
How we built this calculator
- Written by
- Track & Canopy Editorial Team — Trip Planning Desk
- How we calculate
- Questions and scoring follow the seven Leave No Trace principles as interpreted in Australian visitor guidance, and the point values for each answer reflect the current position of parks-agency minimum-impact codes — including the modern pack-it-out position on organics and the existing-site rule for camps.
- Sources & standards
- Last reviewed
- 15 October 2026
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Track & Canopy — Practical gear advice for Australian conditions. Estimates are planning aids, not engineering advice.