We're Ice Ice Maybe and we're harvesting sunshine to make clean ice at Burning Man. In 2024, we generated 600 lbs of solar powered ice, 2x what we produced in 2023, and open sourced our plans. Watch our on-playa solar ice factory walkthrough here or read our 2023 end of year report here.

Here's why we're doing this:

Decommodification is a core principle of Burning Man. In 2022, Burning Man moved closer to full decommodification by removing coffee purchasing from Center Camp - coffee is provided as a gift by a number of camps. Ice has yet to be decommodified - camps purchase it on playa from an establishment called Arctica by cash, Visa/Mastercard or Apple/Google pay. Such commercial exchange goes directly against the principle of decommodification. Getting ice can be a major burden for camps to retrieve every day - not to mention the price has been going up. We are proposing to decommodify ice by making it close to the cost of water through open-source solar-powered production methods.

Another principle of Burning Man is Leaving No Trace. The ice that Arctica serves has a large environmental impact because it comes in single-use plastic bags and it must be trucked into the desert on huge, gas-guzzling refrigerated trucks. Our open source solar ice production plans will enable camps to make ice on playa sustainably without such a high environmental impact.

In the spirit of Radical Self-reliance we are empowering other camps with our open source schematics to manufacture their own ice on playa without the need for relying on Arctica, Visa/Mastercard, or Google/Apple.

In the spirit of Gifting, one of Ice Ice Maybe's major gifts at Burning Man will be our open source plans for solar ice production. We will also be gifting ice in various fun formats. We want to start small, creating enough ice to provide to ourselves and as gifts to other camps and individuals. In future iterations, we can scale up and streamline our ice making capabilities as well as help more camps produce their own. One day we'll make enough ice to have a snowball fight on playa, maybe.