Nepal is giving up on a carrot-and-stick experiment to clean up Mount Everest and moving instead to a straight fee. For the past 11 years, climbers have had to post a $4,000 deposit, refundable only if they brought down at least 18 pounds or so of garbage. The idea was to chip away at an estimated 55 tons of trash on the world's tallest mountain. But tourism officials now say the policy hasn't delivered—the waste problem has "not gone away," and the paperwork has become "an administrative burden," Himal Gautam of the tourism department tells the BBC.
Most of the money has actually been refunded, meaning climbers generally met the trash quota. The problem is where that trash comes from: Cleanups have typically focused on lower camps, while the worst accumulation remains higher up on the mountain. "From higher camps, people tend to bring back oxygen bottles only," says Tshering Sherpa of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee.
Tents and food and drink packaging are often left behind, with a climber on average generating up to 26 pounds of waste during a typical six-week expedition—leading to Everest's nickname as the "world's highest garbage dump," notes National Geographic. Under a new plan, the $4,000 will become a nonrefundable cleanup fee, pending parliamentary approval, per the BBC. The money will fund a new checkpoint at Camp Two and pay for mountain rangers to patrol higher elevations and monitor what climbers bring down.
Local leaders say this approach finally creates a dedicated cleanup fund, and real enforcement. The fee is part of a five-year mountain waste strategy, meant to confront not just abandoned gear and trash, but also human waste that doesn't break down in the deep freeze—an important task, as Everest hosts roughly 400 climbers a year, plus their support teams. Forbes notes that unmanaged waste can eventually contaminate water sources that local communities depend on.
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