“Our mountains have begun to stink,” Mingma Sherpa, chairman of Pasang Lhamu rural municipality and renowned Nepalese mountaineer, told the BBC World Service.
“We are getting complaints that human stools are visible on rocks and some climbers are falling sick. This is not acceptable and erodes our image,” he said.
In the past mountaineering charities and even the Nepalese army have led missions to remove the piles of waste.
It is not an easy mission. The problem extends all the way from base camp, up past the final approach to the summit and the area known as the “death zone”.
Nobody wants to die reclaiming someone else’s poo at 8000m.
Celebrated Nepalese mountaineer Nimsdai Sherpa has been leading paid-for Big Mountain Clean Up operations on Everest and K2 over the past four years, charging guests over US$30,000 ($50,000) to fund rubbish retrieval. However, this well-intentioned and cost-ineffective mission has barely dented the issue of the Himalayas’ big mountain waste problem. Of which Everest is the peak example.
From this year, summit teams will have to buy “poo bags” before attempting a climb. The contents of these will be checked on return to base camp.
These biodegradable bags containing enzymes that decompose human waste have been proposed as a solution to cleaning up Everest.
However, there have been problems in previous years of mountaineers digging holes in the snow, and “covering their tracks”.
The evidence of years of treating the sacred mountain as an open toilet is only surfacing now, as melting conditions arrive for the new spring season.
Debris emerging from the snowpack is “scattered all over the mountain, which makes it even more dangerous for climbers already navigating a slippery, steep slope in snow and high winds”, Ang Tshering, former president of Nepal Mountaineering Association, said in 2019.
That year the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) found 30 tents abandoned on the mountain.
“The biggest problem and concern now on Everest is human waste. Hundreds of people are there for weeks who go to open toilets,” he said.
Everest’s Camp 2 now has a smell of human effluence and there are concerns it is already contaminating water sources for climbers below.
There are an estimated 400 climbers with permits for the 2024 season, which begins in March, along with 800 support staff.
To contain the waste of these mountaineers over their month-long trip, the SPCC has bought 8000 poo bags.
The Nepalese government has also proposed a plan to scan and tag climbers’ equipment and gear on their way to the summit.
Climbers will have to pay a $6500 bond before their climb that could be forfeited if they do not return with the oxygen cylinders or poo bags they took up the mountain.
Leaving poo on the side of Everest could be a very costly deposit.
