HIGHEST ‘DUMP’ IN THE WORLD
Increasing number of big-spending climbers pay little attention to footprint they leave behind
DECADES of commercial mountaineering have turned Mount Everest into the world’s highest rubbish dump as an increasing number of big-spending climbers pay little attention to the ugly footprint they leave behind.
Fluorescent tents, discarded climbing equipment, empty gas canisters and human excrement litter the well-trodden route to the summit of the 8,848m peak.
“It is disgusting, an eyesore,” said. Pemba Dorje Sherpa, who has summited Everest 18 times.
“The mountain is carrying tonnes of waste.”
As the number of climbers on the mountain soared — at least 600 people scaled the world’s highest peak this year alone — the problem worsened.
Melting glaciers caused by global warming are exposing trash that has accumulated on the mountain since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first successful summit 65 years ago.
Five years ago, Nepal implemented a US$4,000 (RM15,900) rubbish deposit per team that would be refunded if each climber brought down at least 8kg of waste. On the Tibet side of the Himalayan mountain, they are required to bring down the same amount and are fined US$100 per kilogramme if they did not.
Last year, climbers in Nepal brought down nearly 25 tonnes of trash and 15 tonnes of human waste, the equivalent of three double-decker buses, according to the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC).
This season, even more was carried down, but this was just a fraction of the rubbish dumped each year, with only half of climbers lugging down the required amounts, SPCC said.
Instead, many climbers choose to forfeit the deposit, a drop in the ocean compared with the US$20,000 to US$100,000 they would have paid for the climb.
Pemba said many just didn’t care. Compounding the problem, some officials accepted small bribes to turn a blind eye, he said.
“There is just not enough monitoring at the high camps to ensure the mountain stays clean.”
The Everest industry boomed in the last two decades. This sparked concerns of overcrowding, as well as fears that inexperienced mountaineers are being drawn by desperate low-cost expedition operators. This inexperience exacerbates the rubbish problem.