Trash Bag as Emergency Sleeping Bag
Kevin Felts 04.11.17
Using a trash bag as an emergency sleeping bag is one of those survival tips you hope you never have to use. The theory is, get inside the trash bag and fill it with leaves and pine straw, which will have an insulting factor.
In reality, the filler will have ticks, spiders, worms and all other kinds of creepy crawly things in it. Add some sweat during the night, and the next day you have a mess.
The other option is to get inside the trash bag, then cover the bag and yourself with pine straw and leaves. Will you will have the same insulating factor, but without having to be stuck in a bag with biting bugs?
A popular YouTuber by the name of KennethKramm sets out to compare leaf litter inside and outside question.
Kenneth uses a hand warmer to warm the inside of the bag, and a thermometer to measure the differences between the leaf litter being inside and outside the bag.
The results were rather surprising.
Moisture
It appears the combination of the leaf litter and hand warmer inside the bag raised the relative humidity. In other words, moisture was pulled from the litter, and with nowhere to go it accumulated inside the bag.
If there had been a person inside the bag, the body heat would have added moisture to the inside of the bag, but to a greater extent. By morning, the person would of been dripping wet from sweat and from the moisture from the leaf litter.
Temperature
Regardless of whether the leaf litter was inside or outside the bag, the internal temperatures were the same.
I figured the leaf litter outside the bag would lose a lot more insulating factor than being inside the bag. From the test Kenneth did, there was no difference in the temperature, just less humidity and fewer bugs with the leaf litter being on the outside.
