Thirty thousand pounds of poop every year, a weight that Mount Everest cannot bear.

In early 2024, Nepal issued new regulations that climbers climbing Mount Everest must collect their own feces in pet poop bags and bring them back to the base camp.

The Khumbu Pasang Lamu Township Government, which manages the Nipol side of Mount Everest, purchased thousands of pet poop bags and distributed them to climbers. A total of 400 foreign climbers, 800 support staff and 300 rescue team members received three bags each to use to bring back their own poop.

The reason for this is that the garbage and feces on Mount Everest have turned into an ecological disaster.

After climbers arrive at the base camp, it usually takes two weeks or more to reach the summit. During this period, a large amount of domestic waste is generated. According to a 2022 report by the Everest Pollution Control Committee, spring climbers produced more than 16,000 kilograms of feces on Mount Everest.

When climbers climb Mount Everest, they spend most of their time at base camp to acclimate to the altitude before starting the trek. The tents at base camp had something like a "toilet" - essentially a hole in the ground with buckets underneath, in which waste was collected and then carried down the mountain by porters and dumped into pits.

The largest garbage pit is located between the villages of Gorakshep and Lobuche in Nepal and dumps an estimated 20,000 kilograms of human waste every year.

Once climbers start climbing to the top, there are no such pits.

When the altitude is below 7,500 meters, many people dig snow caves to relieve themselves. When they climbed to a higher place, everyone didn't even dig holes anymore, they just found any convenient place. Because high altitudes are permafrost, many climbers can climb mountains while admiring the excrement left behind by their predecessors over the decades.

“In the past, climbers would dig random holes near campsites or put snow cubes over their poop for privacy,” said Daniel Mazur, a hike leader for the expedition group Summit Climb. "The feces were not dealt with, and no one thought of taking it with them ."

Once, Dava Steven, the mountaineering leader of the "Asia Tour" company, led his team to camp on the mountainside. They used tools to take some ice cubes from nearby, heated them and drank them, but found a strange taste in their mouths. A few days later, when the temperature rose and the ice and snow melted, they discovered that the place where the tent was set up was a "toilet" dug by previous climbers.  "The weather was dry and cold, and the feces couldn't decompose at all, " Steven told Reuters.

“I never boil snow water to drink at Camp 2 because the air pressure is too low (to boil the water) and cannot kill bacteria. ” Swiss climber Willy Steck told the Washington Post, “Everest has become the world’s Go up to the highest cesspit, sooner or later it will explode like a time bomb. "

In addition to urine and feces, other garbage is also a huge burden on Mount Everest.

Every year during the climbing season, during the few weeks when weather conditions are favorable, more than 600 people attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Each climber has at least one local staff member who cooks, carries equipment and guides the expedition. The mountain has become so crowded that climbers often have to queue for hours in freezing weather to reach the summit, where the air is so thin that oxygen masks are needed to breathe. In single file, they moved at a snail's pace over the Hillary Step, the last obstacle before the summit. When climbers finally reached the top, there was almost no standing room due to overcrowding.

During this period, each person produced an average of about eight kilograms of waste, most of which was left on the mountain. The summit slope is littered with discarded empty oxygen tanks, abandoned tents, and food containers.

Experts estimate that there are currently as many as 50 tons of garbage left behind on Mount Everest, and Everest Base Camp generates 75 tons of garbage every season. Climate change is causing ice and snow to melt, exposing more trash that has been covered up for decades. All this waste is destroying the natural environment and posing serious health risks to everyone living in the Everest watershed.

The Nepalese government stipulates that since 2014, climbers planning to climb to the summit must pay a deposit of US$4,000. When returning to the base camp from the peak, you must bring back 8 kilograms of garbage before the deposit will be returned.

Dr. Alton Byers, a mountain geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been studying Everest's trash problem for decades. He jokingly called the climb to the top the "toilet paper trail" because it was filled with garbage and human excrement.

There is a local joke: climbers do not need to hire a guide, they can just walk along the used toilet paper all the way to the base camp.

Additionally, the Nepal Army reported that it had removed approximately 34 tons of waste from Mount Everest and surrounding mountains in 2022, up from 27.6 tons in 2021. 

Alton said the most polluted part of Everest is Camp 4, the last stop before climbers reach the summit. 

Camp Four

Recycling trash from Camp Four is "virtually impossible," Alton said.

“Camp 4 is located at about 7,900 meters above sea level, in the so-called death zone, just a few hours away from the summit,” Mr. Kaufman explained. 

He added: "When they go down the mountain, they go very fast and throw away their belongings as much as possible because every extra pound means an increased risk of death. "

Sherpas collect trash on Mount Everest

During the 2023 spring climbing season, the local government collected 75 tons of garbage from Everest Base Camp alone. This includes nearly 26 tons of combustible waste, 12 tons of non-combustible waste, 9 tons of kitchen waste and 21.5 tons of human waste.

In theory, the waste should be shipped to Kathmandu for recycling, but Alton doesn't think that's necessarily the case. He said: “Now we know that this waste does not go into the recycling system, but is landfilled on site .

"Every year, tons of even toxic waste are buried in landfills near Everest National Park. " Alton estimates that there are 100 to 120 open landfills on Everest. Trash that doesn't end up in landfills is burned, releasing toxic chemicals into the air. 

Compared with the southern slope of Nepal, the northern slope of Mount Everest on the Chinese side has relatively better environmental pollution. The main reason is that the number of climbers on the northern slope is much smaller. In 2022, Nepal issued a total of 408 Everest climbing permits, including 290 spring permits and 118 autumn permits; in the same year, China only issued 31 Everest climbing permits, including 21 spring permits and 10 fall licenses.

But even so, in 2018, China organized a garbage cleanup team of 30 people to clean up 8.5 tons of garbage from the north slope of Mount Everest in two months, including approximately 5.2 tons of domestic garbage, 2.3 tons of human excrement and 1 ton of human waste. The amount of mountaineering garbage is also considerable.

Environmental pollution from mountain climbing is a common problem, but for the holy Mount Everest, this problem is even more urgent.

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