Nepal tried to clean up trash from Mount Everest. It didn’t go well

The summit of Mount Everest, often described as the “highest landfill in the world,” is littered with trash left behind by countless expeditions. Cleaning it has not been an easy task.

Nepal has tried to solve the problem of garbage accumulated on top of the Monte Evereste with an idea apparently simple: oblige climbers to pay a fee of 4,000 dollars, about 3,400 euroswhich would be returned only if they brought at least 8 kilos of garbage back from the top of the mountain.

The plan didn’t work, it turned out to be a sea of ​​bureaucracy and paperwork, and Everest continued to be full of rubbish. Now, Nepal has decided to start all over again.

According to , Nepali authorities now admit that the program failed. After 11 years, it is estimated that Everest is still between 40 to 50 tons of waste, much of it concentrated in the highest and most dangerous fields — in a location supposedly so inaccessible.

According to Nepalese officials, the system of taxing mountaineers has become an “administrative burden” and did not bring concrete results.

Most climbers managed to get the money backtechnically complying with the rules. But in practice, they limited themselves to collecting rubbish from the lower camps, not from the upper zoneswhere trash is more difficult to remove and more visible.

This was a easy to explore gap. But there is another: during the six weeks that an ascent to the summit lasts, each climber generates, on average, around 12 kilos of waste. The rule only required them to bring 8 kiloswhich leaves a considerable difference: 4 kg of trash per climber.

Furthermore, supervision was practically non-existent — there aren’t exactly police officers with batons in hand patrolling Everest and fining those who litter, notes . There is a checkpoint above the Khumbu Icefall, but from there no one controls anything.

Climbers are left to their own devices. According to a member of one of the organizations that manages this checkpoint, cited by the BBC, the only thing that almost everyone ends up bringing back are the oxygen containers.

Food packages and tents are left there for the next expeditions to have to overcome.

So what is the new plan? The Nepalese authorities now want to move to a Fixed cleaning fee, non-refundablein the same value of 4,000 dollars.

This money would be channeled into a conservation fund intended to install checkpoints in higher fieldspost mountain guards, build infrastructure for waste treatment and, with luck, return some dignity to a once grand dream — and that humanity, literally, treated like a dog.

This change is part of a new plan to clean up the mountain over the next five years, with the aim of making sustainability a more realistic goal. And they need to achieve this, because with around 400 climbers per year and their respective support elements, the problem only tends to get worse.