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ENVIRONMENT: EVEREST CLEAN-UP
Clean Break
As part of the uphill battle to protect the fragile
ecosystem of the world's highest mountain, seven tonnes of garbage are
brought down in the spring climbing season
By Salil Subedi in Kathmandu and Sudhir Sahi in
Delhi
At 8,000 metres,
high above the push and swell of the world, the wind is as sharp as a
knife-edge, the air so thin it can elude human lungs and the snow-covered
ground is as pure as... A garbage dump?
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| FROZEN WASTES: Noguchi
sifts through some of the 1,600 kg of rubbish his expedition brought
down from Everest |
Freeze frame and then abandon the image of a
pristine icy wilderness because 8,000 m up on Mount Everest, the magnificence
of nature takes a back seat to the reality of the modern mountaineering
industry. South Col, one of the highest camp sites for attempts on the
summit of the world's highest peak, is littered with discarded oxygen
cylinders, twisted tent poles, shattered tent fabric and dead bodies.
It has been described as the world's highest garbage dump where nothing
will decompose. Not just South Col, the entire Everest region, a fragile
ecosystem, is said to be dotted with 100 tons of human waste and the debris
of trekking equipment.
The scale of the problem which has grown alongside
the boom in "Everest tourism" can be judged by the fact that
in the spring 2001 climbing season which ended in May, more than 7,000
kg of garbage was collected from the Everest and removed from the area.
But there is still a very long way to go and for the Nepalese government,
a very delicate balance to be struck.
Dr Tirtha Bahadur Shreshtha, one of Nepal's
leading environmentalists, explains why the ecology of the Everest region
is in real danger: "From the snow line, which normally starts at
an altitude of 4,500 m, biodegradable and non-degradable wastes pose an
equal threat to the high-altitude ecology because there is no biotic activity."
Meaning nothing decomposes or changes form in the low temperatures at
that height, which can fall to minus 60 degrees Celsius. Initiatives at
cleaning up Everest are now directed from many sources. For example, the
Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA), in collaboration with the Ministry
of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation and the Nepal Tourism Board, working
with a budget of Nepalese Rs 40 lakh (Indian Rs 25 lakh), air-lifted 4,113
kg of waste from Everest this spring, its second attempt at a high-altitude
clean-up (8,000 m and above) after 1996. Of the total waste, 2,316 kg
of biodegradable wastes were collected, burnt or buried at the Everest
base camp and the rest of the non-biodegradable waste like gas and oxygen
cylinders, some dating back to 1952 and 1961, and broken aluminium ladders
were air-lifted back to Kathmandu for proper disposal.
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| * Japanese climber Ken Noguchi's group collected
1.6 tonnes of trash on the northern/Tibetan route in spring 2001 |
Japanese climber Ken Noguchi, working with 50
other mountaineers from five countries, went up the North Col (Tibetan)
route to the Everest and brought down 1,600 kg of garbage as part of the
2001 Noguchi/Asia Qomolongma Clean-Up Expedition. This is the second clean-up
expedition launched by Noguchi, who became the youngest climber to scale
the highest peaks on the world's seven continents. His first environmental
expedition last year collected 1.5 tons of garbage. This year the Japanese
climber's group included 50 mountaineers from five countries who had a
budget of 53 million Yen. One of the members of the expedition, Lakpa
Sherpa, finished the clean-up and then scaled the peak becoming the first
Nepalese woman to summit Everest from both the southern and northern routes.
"Work was tough. We had to dig out clusters from the snow and fight
the strong wind," she recalls. "After we filled the sacks, others
returned and I started my climb up from 8,300 m," she says.
Another team of 48 "environmental trekkers"
from the Explore Group Nepal and the Arbeitskreis Trekking and Expedition
Group, Austria, worked in the Khumbu region for two weeks and brought
down 40 gunny bags of tourist-generated trash, mostly tin cans, plastic
wrappers and batteries, which they say weighed more than a tonne. As the
scale and scope of the continuing abuse of the Everest region has been
felt and calculated, climbers and conservationists alike have tried to
work out ways to minimise the damage in one of the world's most popular
trekking and climbing regions, including paying porters to carry down
the trash.
"Porters would come down empty-handed and
bringing down the trash meant extra income for them," says Ang Phuri
Sherpa, the coordinator of both the rejuvenation programme and NMA's environmental
committee. The Austrian-Nepalese expedition paid porters Nepalese Rs 200
($2.6) per kilo of garbage they carried down from the Khumbu while last
summer an American environmental group paid Sherpas $7 for every kilo
of trash and $10 for each oxygen cylinder for high altitude portering
down from South Col. The group brought down 632 bottles of oxygen and
more than 4,000 kg of garbage that year.
Recently one group made public the fact that
their clean-up expedition had reduced fees by as much as 2,000 Deutsche
marks (Rs 40,000) charging members 3,000 DMs instead of 5,000 for a three-week
tourist package. Ang Phuri Sherpa believes that much cleaning has been
done at high altitudes. But he says, "Of course there is trash still
to be retrieved, but now the biggest challenge is to bring down the corpses."
There could be over 100 corpses on various parts of the Everest.
There are now concerns that the clean-up operation
may just end up becoming a bandwagon which eager climbers will clamber
aboard as fees for environmental expeditions may be reduced and the groups
may even be given preference in the long waiting lists over climbs purely
for the "sport" of it. However, expedition operators deny that
this is the case.
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