Kathmandu: Mount Everest, the highest peak and a mountaineer’s dream summit, is known for all its mightiness and beauty. However, decades of commercial mountaineering have turned it into rubbish dump as climbers pay little attention to things they leave behind.
Fluorescent tents, discarded climbing equipment, empty gas canisters and even human excrement litter the well-trodden route to the summit of the 8,848-metre (29,029-foot) peak.
One of the climbers, Pemba Dorje Sherpa, having reached the peak 18 times said it is disgusting. “The mountain is carrying tonnes of waste,” she added.
With the number of climbers going up, the problem has worsened. Report said at least 600 people scaled the Mt. Everest this year alone. Meanwhile, melting glaciers due to global warming is exposing all the trash accumulated since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the climb.
Efforts, however, have been made by Nepal. They implemented a $4,000 rubbish deposit per team that would be refunded if each climber brought down at least eight kilograms of waste. On the Tibet side, they are required to bring down the same amount and are fined 100$ per kilogram if they don’t.
“In 2017, 25 tonnes of trash and 15 tonnes of human waste was brought back by climbers from Nepal. This season, even more was carried down, according to Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC).
This is just a fraction of the rubbish dumped each year, with only half of climbers lugging down the required amounts, it added.
The Everest industry has boomed in the last two decades and has led to concerns of overcrowding as well as fears that ever more inexperienced mountaineers are lured by the low-cost expedition operators.
Environmentalists’ concerns are the affects of pollution on Everest to water sources down the valley. The raw sewage, at the moment, is carried to the next village and dumped into trenches, which then gets flushed downhill during the monsoon into the river.
Plans are afoot to install a biogas plant near Everest base camp to turn climber poo into a useful fertilizer.
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