Want to Climb Mt. Everest? You Must Bring Back 17 Pounds of Garbage

It's an old summer camp trick: make everyone bring five pieces of garbage to lunch, and the camp is five garbage pieces per person cleaner than it would be otherwise. And what is Mount Everest, if not the world’s highest campground? Okay, sure, Mount Everest is a lot of other things, but when it comes to reducing the amount of litter that climbers leave behind, Nepali authorities have a pretty familiar-sounding plan for a very familiar-sounding problem.

Starting this spring, officials at Everest base camp will check to make sure that climbers are dismounting with at least an extra 8 kg—or over 17 pounds—of garbage in tow, which is what they estimate climbers discard along the route.

Over the past six decades, visitors to the Himalayas have left behind an estimated 50 tons of garbage, ranging from oxygen tanks and food wrappers to literally tons of human waste. In addition to withholding a $4,000 deposit from climbers who don’t stop by base camp with their 17.6 pounds of garbage, Nepali authorities have threatened “serious legal action,” against those who aren’t pulling their extra weight. A lifetime ban on climbing Everest has been mentioned, which makes me wonder how often someone from outside of Nepal climbs it.

But threats to withhold the deposit have been around for years, with little enforcement and elsewhere, government officials have said they don’t expect you to carry out anyone else’s garbage only that their concern is making sure no more debris is added to the mountain.

"We are not asking climbers to search and pick up trash left by someone else," Maddhu Sudan Burlakoti, head of the mountaineering department at the Tourism Ministry, told the Associated Press. "We just want them to bring back what they took up."

One possible explanation for this confusion is that Nepal relies on tourists flocking to the Himalayas like bar-headed geese. The government collected $3 million in climbing fees in 2012, and recently cut the cost of an individual climbing fee for foreigners from $25,000 to $11,000 in order to attract more visitors.

Thus definitely won’t take famed Italian mountaineer (and Ben Folds alias) Reinhold Messner’s advice and close the mountain to let it recover. Tens of thousands of Nepalese hotel owners, guides, and porters depend on Mount Everest for their livelihood. While this might result in a crowded, not-very-frontiersy-feeling climb, as was vividly outlined by Mark Jenkins in National Geographic last year , Nepal needs the money, so it’s likely to continue.

Even if Everest becomes less test of the human spirit and more of a park on the roof of the world—make no mistake the mountain is still really dangerous, and one thing Jenkins said needed to be collected from the mountain were frozen corpses—it will at least be a marginally cleaner one at first. Maybe making people clean up their garbage and carry an extra 20 pounds of garbage will reintroduce the difficulty to those who worry that it’s getting too easy. At the very least the world’s highest camp can be a clean one.