Ten tonnes of trash including aluminium ladders and cans collected in Nepal for recycling

To commemorate the World’s Environment Day yesterday, on June 5, some ten tonnes of garbage including aluminium ladders and cans were collected in Nepal for recycling, said Nepali officials.

A team of fourteen men was sent by the government for six weeks to scour for litter from base camp to Camp 4 - nearly 26,300 feet up to collect empty cans, bottles, plastic and discarded climbing gear.

The bags of trash arrived at Kathmandu on road and air and then handed over to a local recycling company. They will be divided manually into different materials and then recycled accordingly.

“We collected (the trash) but managing it is also very important,” Dandu Raj Ghimire, chief of Nepal’s tourism department, told reporters. 

“Usually there is a big volume of metal, aluminium, glass and heavy and light metal which can be easily recycled,” said Nabim Bikash Maharjan of Blue Waste to Value, adding that some would go to supplying a utensils factory in Kathmandu.

Governments on both sides of the mountain had been trying hard to manage the trash left by an increasing number of climbers. Six years ago, Nepal had implemented a US$4,000 rubbish deposit per team that would be refunded if each climber brought down at least eight kilos of waste. However, only half of the climbers had returned with the trash.

In February, China had even banned non-climbers from accessing its Everest base camp in Tibet in an attempt to clean up its side of the mountain.