2.
INTO THIN AIR, AND THICK REFUSE
In the 50 years since Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary first
scaled Mt. Everest, so much refuse piled up on the world's highest
mountain that some took to calling it the world's highest garbage
dump.  By the early 1990s, an estimated 50 tons of metal, glass, and
plastic, including many hundreds of abandoned oxygen canisters, had
been left behind by climbers struggling to reach the summit.  The
Nepali government has made notable progress during the past decade in
tackling the trash problem, slapping fines on climbers who don't
bring their oxygen bottles and other equipment down with them and
organizing cleanup expeditions, some of which were funded by
royalties paid by climbers.  The main source of pollution now is
human excrement left behind by climbers, said Ken Noguchi of Japan,
who has led four cleanup missions on the mountain since 2000.  Even
as climbers become more conscientious about treading lightly, the
high-altitude landscape continues to be threatened by an ever-growing
number of expeditions that try to make it to the top each year.

straight to the source:  Terra Daily, Agence France-Presse, 24 May 2003
http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=1163>


Just as an FYI -- the cleanup isn't only voluntary -- the climbers pay fees
to Nepal for cleanup expeditions, are required to bring their own stuff back
down (the fine is *huge* if they don't) and are also required to bring a
certain percentage of garbage down from prior climbs. Last I heard there had
been significant improvements.

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