Climbers slip up by leaving banana skins on UK peaks

CLIMBERS are being urged to stop leaving banana skins and orange peel on Britain’s highest mountains because they freeze and fail to biodegrade.

Conservation teams looking after Ben Nevis and Mount Snowdon say visitors must treat “organic litter” as they would other litter, because it can take so long to decompose.

The call follows a “surge” in visitor numbers to the country’s tallest mountain, Ben Nevis, and comes after the Real3peaks Challenge, a mountain clean-up campaign, collected almost 18lb of banana skins last week.

The waste, which is discarded by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the mountains, is often left behind as walkers assume that peel takes just weeks to decompose.

The Snowdonia National Park Authority complained that when every climber carries a snack the waste left behind is “significant” and takes years to disappear. It also said the eventual biodegrading process can also be problematic for the natural environment and changes the acidity of the soil.

The John Muir Trust, a conservation charity, added that it collected 1,000 banana skins from the Ben Nevis summit during a clean-up of litter in 2009, but that the problem was growing.

“The cold weather is the issue, the breakdown process is far slower and takes up to two years. Some portions of the mountain are sub-zero all year round where the sun doesn’t reach, it’s pretty much a sub-arctic climate,” a spokesman for the trust said.

“It varies from year to year, but in some parts for most of the year it’s like being frozen.”

An increase in visitor numbers has exacerbated the issue. The mountain ordinarily sees 120,000 take on the summit each year, but last year more than 160,000 people visited Ben Nevis.

Peter Rutherford, the Snowdonia National Park Authority’s access officer, said: “If you have 550,000 walkers a year on Snowdon alone, and everybody has an apple or a banana in their bag, then this is a significant amount of organic waste that will take a few years to decompose.

“It’s unfortunate that people don’t equate litter with organic litter. Our advice is that whatever goes up should go down.”