Mount Everest Is Covered In Trash Left Behind By Climbers. What’s Being Done About It?

This past May, I had the opportunity to visit the famed Everest region in northeastern Nepal, known also as the Khumbu region. During 12 days, my trekking group with the local hospitality organization Mountain Lodges of Nepal (MLN) walked through fragrant pine forests, slept in traditional villages, including Monjo and Kongde, met Buddhist monks, and immersed ourselves in a part of the world that, despite its ample tourism, feels enshrouded in mystery. My trip culminated at Everest Base Camp, at nearly 18,000 feet above sea level; from there, hundreds of brave trekkers (along with their sizable teams) attempt every spring to summit the world’s highest mountain.

A part of me was skeptical about the trip. Like many, I’ve read with horror about the conditions on Mount Everest: queues of climbers waiting to summit, oxygen canisters and other debris discarded on the mountainside, and piles of human waste, which is unable to decompose at such high altitudes. I didn’t want to be part of the problem. (As I discuss further in my feature story for Afar, MLN led us on a trek that actively stays away from higher-traffic areas, in part to have a gentler impact on the Earth.)

Earlier this year, Kanchha Sherpa, who is the last surviving member of Edmund Hillary’s summit team from their inaugural 1953 ascent, called the peak “crowded and dirty” in an interview with the Guardian. “Some climbers just dump their trash in the crevasse, which would be hidden at that time, but eventually it will flow down to base camp as the snow melts and carries them downward.”

Nevertheless, I kept an open mind and was pleasantly surprised to learn about local efforts to keep the area free of pollution and build resilience in the face of a changing climate. On a hike one day, we visited Sagarmatha Next, a Nepali nonprofit organization that is working to reduce trash—and sometimes upcycle it into art. They transform bottle caps into three-dimensional sculptures of the Himalayan range (available for purchase), while other pieces of waste are reimagined as large-scale art pieces on display at their high-altitude gallery.

Tourism in the Everest region “wasn’t developed with sustainability in mind,” said Tommy Gustafsson, the organization’s cofounder. That began to shift in 1998, when local Sherpa people founded an NGO here, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC). Today, SPCC manages 120 waste bins and collects 40–50 tons of waste each year from Everest Base Camp alone. (There are an estimated 200–250 tons of solid waste generated each year in the Everest region altogether, says Gustafsson.)

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

Beyond the expedition teams that attempt to summit Everest, casual trekkers to the Khumbu region can get directly involved with cleanup efforts. In the spring of 2022, SPCC and Sagarmatha Next jointly started a Carry Me Back program in which tourists volunteer to bring 2.2 pounds of waste down the mountain.

Mountaineers attempting to summit Everest are asked to do more. Given how quickly glaciers are melting in the Himalayas, the human waste has disastrous consequences on the fresh water supply. To that end, 2024 was the first year Mount Everest climbers were given “poop bags” to use and carry back down with them.

Dawa Pangkarma Sherpa, a vice chairman at SPCC, told me that in this inaugural year, the bags had about a 40 percent success rate. “It’s good, but we need that to be higher,” he told me over the phone after my trip. “We can make a strong policy, but we went there and saw that people are physically very weak [while descending from the summit]. Human life is more important than trash at that point.”

In particular, the Khumbu Icefall—located close to Base Camp—is treacherous for hikers to ascend and descend. Sherpa told me that SPCC is going to experiment with a drone next year that can help carry about 40 pounds of garbage at a time over the Icefall.

“My general feeling is that the majority of trekkers and climbers are pretty conscious and don’t want to trash the place,” Gustafsson said. Rather, he said, it’s about building infrastructure that makes it easy for travelers to participate in cleanup efforts and to leave the Himalayas better for having visited.

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

Everest’s warming climate

As is the case in fragile environments around the world, there are irreversible signs of a changing climate that can undo even the best anti-pollution efforts. A few months after my trek, glacial lakes above the picturesque village of Thame burst and caused a major landslide. Experts believe that warmer ambient temperatures, combined with an unusually strong monsoon season, caused the breakage. Most of the village, including the MLN lodge where I spent two nights, no longer exists. Thankfully, the landslide did not result in any loss of life.

“It was an unexpected disaster,” said Sherpa. “Normally we can see a landslide in advance, but now no one can predict. When I was six years old, every winter we would have a lot of snow. It used to be four seasons, and now it’s two: a short winter without much snow and a long monsoon.” To prevent future similar disasters, he said, SPCC is working with several climate experts who can advise on how to protect the thousands of lakes in the region.

Adapting to climate change on Everest, and in the Khumbu region more generally, starts with collecting more accurate data about what is happening throughout the region. To that end, the Kathmandu Post last year reported on new weather data collection services installed on the slopes of Mount Everest—and emphasized the importance of tracking shifts in weather, in part to help predict avalanches and other shifts that could endanger human life.

For building longer-term resilience, people will likely need to make some wholesale changes in how they interact with the region. Alan Arnette is a mountaineer who summited Everest in 2011 and runs a blog popular among trekkers, which in part covers news about the mountain every climbing season. Like Sherpa, he has been closely watching the future of the mountain. “The Khumbu Icefall is getting thinner, and a lot of glaciers [there] are getting thinner, and thus more volatile,” he said. “There are predictions out there that it’ll one day become unclimbable because it’ll be too dangerous.”

He is not totally without hope, though. “Climate change may be a forcing function to rethink how we interact with the outdoors,” he said. “This gives the younger generation the chance to pioneer new routes; they’ll have to explore again instead of going up the same old route. Some mountains could use a decade of nobody climbing them.”

Others have suggested moving Everest Base Camp, which is located on a thinning glacier. In a 2022 podcast conversation with Al Jazeera, mountain guide Dawa Yangzon Sherpa said that this would be good for the environment, although it would make the climb potentially more dangerous.

Regardless of how people interact with Nepal’s Everest region, including which routes trekkers use, Dawa Pangkarma Sherpa believes that efforts to clean and make Everest more climate-resilient are a top priority. “Everest is not only for us, but for people all over the world,” he said. “We must keep it alive for the next generation.”