The Problem Of Garbage On The Mount Everest
Ever since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, exhibitionists and adventurers alike have traveled in waves to get a taste of the near forty-day hike. Standing tall at just over 29,000 feet, Sagarmatha, Everest’s Sanskrit name meaning “peak of heaven”, seems to boast a mysterious and enticing beauty, but perhaps the reality isn’t exactly what climbers had envisioned.
After over sixty years of constant exploration, Mt. Everest has been coined the “world’s highest garbage dump”. Human waste including cans, bottles, wrappers, climbing gear, and other essential equipment litter the slopes, abandoned in a careless attempt to lighten the loads of the ambitious climbers. Much of this garbage has been preserved in the snow and ice for 10, 20, 30 years, sometimes even longer. This and human feces, built up due to lack of proper, efficient waste management systems, have begun to resurface in the wake of global warming and leak into what little water supply the mountain has to offer. The bodies of climbers who died in their attempts, have become permanent parts of the paths which new climbers will ascend. Environmentalists and conservationists, terrified at the prospect of losing one of the world’s most unique ecosystems to human vanity, have begun to sound the alarms.
Beginning in the early 2010s, countless conservation and clean-up efforts have been led in an effort to save the mountain before irreversible damage is done. In 2019 alone, a team of fourteen men and women commissioned by the Nepali government removed three tons of garbage and waste from the camp sites and properly disposed of it. This pales, however, in comparison to the 12 tons of garbage left annually on the mountain.
The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), created in 1991 to help keep pollution under control, has begun to impose strict rules on climbers as a preventative measure against waste build up. All exhibitionists are required to pay a deposit of $4,000 for essential climbing equipment before they begin their journey. This effort attempts to encourage the climbers to bring back as much of the equipment as possible and thus to reduce the footprint that they leave behind them. However, climbers often pay anywhere from $30,000 to $120,000 in total to attempt the climb, so the deposit does not carry much weight and doesn’t always work as intended. Additionally, many have acknowledged that the SPCC lacks the resources to track all of the climbers that visit the mountain, and therefore they cannot enforce their policies effectively across all tourists.
Though many conservationist groups have recommended enforcing a tight regulation of the number of people allowed to ascend the mountain at one time, it is unlikely that the government would enforce such policies due to the fear that this would significantly reduce the amount of money flowing in from tourism which Nepal is highly dependent upon.
