Five ways to leave a stopover cleaner than you found it

Every pub that lets you sleep in the car park is doing you a favour. There's no contract, no booking system, and usually no charge beyond the meal you were going to eat anyway. That arrangement survives on trust, and trust is lost one overflowing bin bag at a time.

These are the five things we do at every stopover, whether it's a pub, a campsite or a lay-by with a view.

1. Walk the pitch before you leave

Do a slow lap of the van before you pull away. Not a glance from the driver's seat, an actual walk. Look under the sills and behind the wheels. You'll find the bottle top that rolled under the step, the peg you forgot, the bit of tissue the wind took.

If the ground was muddy, scrape the worst of it off the road or gravel with your boot so the next arrival isn't driving through your ruts. On grass, if you have left a mark, mention it to whoever runs the place. They would far rather hear it from you.

2. Grey water goes in a drain, not the hedge

Washing-up water smells of nothing when it leaves the sink and smells of a lot once it has sat in a hedge for two days in August. Fat, food scraps and detergent kill grass and attract rats, and a landlord who finds a grey patch under where your van stood will remember it.

Keep it in the tank or a collapsible container and empty it at a proper point: a campsite waste drain, a motorhome service point, or the drain the pub tells you to use. If there is nowhere, take it home. It's a few litres.

For the full picture on tanks, cassettes and where you can legally empty what, see water, waste and where to empty.

3. Your rubbish leaves with you

Pub bins are for the pub. A commercial waste contract is priced on volume, and a bag of nappies and tins in the landlord's bin is a cost you've handed to them. The same goes for campsite bins marked for site use only, and it goes double for the little council bin by the bench, which was emptied once last Tuesday.

A lidded box in the van for rubbish and another for recycling solves this. Empty them at home or at a supermarket recycling point on the way back.

4. Noise, light and the cassette

Three things people notice from inside a pub or the house next door:

• Engine and heater fans at seven in the morning. If you run a diesel heater, let it run late rather than early, and don't idle the engine to warm the cab.
• Awning lights and screens after closing time. A van lit up like a chip shop at midnight is the thing a neighbour complains about to the landlord.
• The toilet cassette. It is never, ever emptied into a pub toilet unless you have been told you can. Ask. Most pubs would rather you used their loo during opening hours than anything else.

5. Say thank you, and spend something

Leave on good terms. Find the person who said yes last night, tell them you're off, and thank them. If you ate and drank there, you've already done the important bit. If you didn't, buy a coffee or a bottle of something before you go.

Then, if the place was good, log it. A pub that gets a steady trickle of polite vans buying dinner will keep saying yes, and the next person who searches for somewhere to stay will find it.

The short version. Walk the pitch, keep your water, keep your rubbish, keep the noise down, say thanks. Five minutes, and the pub stays on the map.