Mount Everest: Beautiful, but littered.
Wongchu Sherpa and Tommy Gustafsson, presenting the cleaning project.
Sweden has an active community of mountaineers and if I’ve counted right no less than 15 Swedes have managed to reach the top of the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest. But seeing how climbers don’t only mean good things for the area, the adventurer Tommy Gustafsson decided to do something about the heaps of garbage that visitors leave behind, and that threatens to convert Mount Everest into a dustbin.
Tommy Gustafsson teamed up with the Nepalese sherpa Wongchu Sherpa, and together they managed to engage the Nepaleses government. Now the project Saving Mount Everest 2011 is ready to go. Beginning in mid April, the first phase of this project will clean up the garbage lying iaround the basecamps along the moutain top route. The goal is to bring down about 8 000 kilos of garbage, which will be sorted, recycled, reused and the rest being transported to Kathmandu.
Garbage at Mount Everest.
But cleaning up won’t change much if new visitors keep littering the mountain. Therefore the project will work with building up the garbage management system of the mountain villages. It will also aim an information project both at the local communities living in the mountain villages and at the climbers visiting the area.
One of the Swedish climbers engaged in the project is Fredrik Sträng, who climbed Mount Everest in 2006. At the presentation in Stockholm last week, he told us a story from his time in the Swedish military service. There, whatever was taken out on a military excercise also had to be taken back. So when one of the guys forgot a lollipop wrap in the mountains of North Sweden, he was simply ordered to go back and look for it! Applying this discipline to climbers in the Himalayas would surely make a difference.
But garbage isn’t the only environmental challenge for Mount Everest. Its glaciers are melting because of climate change. And most of the visitors come to Nepal by air, emitting tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and thereby contributing to the melting of Himalaya’s ices.
I spoke to Renata Chlumska, the first Swedish woman to reach the top of Mount Everest, who admitted this is a difficult question. But in fact her fiancé Göran Kropp (who passed away in a climbing accident in 2002) managed to go all the way from Sweden to Mount Everest by bike (and write a book about it too). So it’s not entirely impossible!
