In Tibet it is called Holy Mother. In Nepal it’s the Goddess in the Sky. The world knows it as Mount Everest, the tallest mountain, and the highest point on Earth. It was named to honour George Everest in 1856, the Surveyor General of India at the time Mount Everest was understood to be the highest mountain on Earth. George Everest protested the mountain being named after him on several reasonable grounds, firstly that he had nothing to do with the mountain, he had never even seen it, and Everest was difficult to write and nearly impossible to pronounce in Hindi. However, the name stuck.

Despite George Everest’s objections to the name, it has come to be more suitable than anyone in the 19th century could have ever foreseen. Nearly a hundred years would pass between the official naming of the mountain and the first recorded successful summit of it in 1953, and since then there have been over 4000 successful summits, with an average of 800 people attempting to climb each year. However, there have been over 200 deaths on the mountain with most of the bodies remaining on the mountain. It is standard practice to leave bodies behind since it is nearly impossible to retrieve them safely due to the challenging environment of the mountain, and some have become a grim warning to other climbers who had no choice but to pass them on their journey up and down from the mountain. The bodies of fallen climbers may be shifted and moved over time by avalanches and the wind, however they will forever be at rest on the mountain.

And it is not only just corpses which lay preserved on the sides of Mount Everest. Tonnes of waste from the climbs, from empty oxygen, tents, discarded food wrappers, batteries, bottles, and human waste, are left as frozen rubbish on the mountain. The result is that now the snow and water on the mountain is contaminated with microplastics, including samples taken near the summit. Climbing Mount Everest has become increasingly popular in recent years, with the Nepalese government increasing the number of granted permits for climbing the mountain nearly consecutively since 2008, from 160 permits granted in 2008 to 408 permits granted in 2021, with additional permits being granted from the Tibetan side of the mountain.

For the local people, climbing Mount Everest is an important industry. Sherpas, an ethnic group native to the Himalayas, are renowned for their climbing skills and often serve as guides and porters for the climbers during the ascent and descent from the summit. It is a highly dangerous profession, however they can earn thousands of dollars with every season, a huge amount in poverty-stricken Nepal.
This influx of climbers will inevitably result in a rise of rubbish and corpses on the mountain. The balance between the environment and tourist income has often seen to be one of division, with overworked, underpaid workers from developing countries taking the brunt of it all.

One solution is increasing the infrastructure needed to support both climbers as well as the local people of the region and twinning that with sustainability. A project which aims to do both is the Mount Everest Biogas Project.

With hundreds of climbers and sherpas attempting to summit every year in a process which lasts for over three months, human waste on the mountain is an ever-growing problem. Annually, over 12 tons of human waste are left on the mountain, which is not only unsightly, spoiling the once pristine landscape, but poses severe risks to water sources. The Nepali government has enacted regulations since 1991 to remove waste on Everest, though the remote location and lack of infrastructure had hindered this process and the number of climbers only increased. How human waste was treated prior to 2014 was that it was placed in barrels at Base Camp then carried back down the mountain and dumped untreated into pits to decay. However, due to the high altitude and low temperatures this takes a while. However, by 2014 there was no longer any room to dig for more pits, and instead sherpas turned to dumping the waste in shallow areas which lay besides rivers, running the risk of contaminating the water supply for villages down river.

The Mount Everest Biogas Project aims to deploy a solar-powered biogas system which is capable of operating at extreme high-altitude environmental conditions of the Himalayas, eliminating the hazardous dumping of untreated human waste. Not only will this biogas system help preserve the region, but it will also provide direct benefits to the people of Nepal in the form of environmentally safe products: a clean burning renewable energy source (methane gas) and an odourless nutrient-rich effluent that may be used as fertiliser.
A traditional way to produce biogas is through an anaerobic digestion system, a large tank where microorganisms feed on a mixture of water and bacteria found in organic waste, breaking down the waste and producing two by-products: methane which is a renewable natural gas, and a pathogen-reduced effluent. It typically operates at low elevations and in warm climates where bacteria can easily grow and with a wide range of fuel including food scraps, animal, and human waste. However, the Mount Everest Biogas Project faces challenges being in a cold environment at high altitude. Mount Everest Biogas Project has undertaken research in an array of different matters such as heat loss modelling and atmospheric conditions. The result of this research led to the conclusion that the tank needed to include a heating design and shelter that performs in the harsh atmosphere.

The Mount Everest Biogas Project continues to have support from the local community and climbers in addressing one of the most unsightly and unhygienic issues facing the environment of Mount Everest today. The Project’s research means that the specialist anaerobic digestion system can be replicated in other cold and high-altitude environments, ensuring that the vital industry of tourism and a supply of energy can sustain the future of mountaineering.

By Eve Maleham