In the olden days, when our parents walked to school barefoot uphill in both directions, the idea of someone climbing Everest was astonishing. A pure feat of human endurance that stopped the world. Edmund Hillary took seven weeks from base camp to the peak in 1953, and the fact that I even know his name without Googling it should tell you everything about what that achievement meant. Now we talk about that girl who got frostbite and posted it on Instagram. Names mean nothing anymore. The summit has become an Oprah Winfrey moment: you get a summit, you get a summit, everybody gets a summit. Nepal issued a record number of climbing permits in 2026, breaking the previous record of 479 set in 2023, and the mountain that once represented the absolute outer limit of human capability has become a very expensive item on a bucket list. The achievement has been made so ordinary by social media documentation that the main talking point of the last climbing season was not a record broken or a life saved. It was the human waste. Three tonnes of it, sitting between camp one and camp four, visible on the rocks, making people ill. "Our mountains have begun to stink," says Mingma Sherpa, chairman of the Pasang Lhamu rural municipality. Now, Everest has two major issues. Number 1 and number 2. You might think that under 500 people climbing this frozen hell isn't a lot. But this is only a small fraction of the nearly 40,000 people that make their way to Base Camp. Nature has called, and now regrets it, because yellow snow is taking over, and it's not a pretty sight. ai-generated image The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee estimates that there are 3 tonnes of human waste between camps 3 and 4. The committee has been attempting to manage the environmental consequences of Everest tourism since 1991 and has done so with varying degrees of success. Half of those three tonnes are estimated to be concentrated at South Col, also known as Camp Four, at 7,906 metres above sea level. Stephan Keck, an international mountain guide who organises Everest expeditions, describes South Col as an open toilet. "There is hardly any ice and snow," he says, "so you will see human stools all around." The reason the waste does not disappear is the same reason the mountain is so extraordinary and so dangerous: the extreme cold. At altitude, excrement does not degrade. It freezes, it accumulates, and when temperatures shift, it thaws and contaminates water sources used by climbers further down the mountain. Climbers have been getting sick. Of all the things that can kill you on Everest, poop was pretty low down on the list. Cleanwaste Store / Amazon “The only good part about the human waste situation above Base Camp is that sh*t freezes fast at 8,000 meters,” Adrian Ballinger told Outside. He is a veteran Everest guide and founder of Alpenglow Expeditions, and adds that “beyond that, it’s an inexcusable embarrassment. If you walk from one tent to another in Camp II or IV, you will step in sh*t. If you melt snow from the camp areas, you are drinking shit.” On average, a climber produces 250 grams of dookie per day, and they spend about two weeks in the higher camps during a summit attempt. Put your Rain Man hat on for a second and multiply that by 400 climbers and 800 support staff across a season. That sounds like a sh*tshow if I have ever seen one. The SPCC is now addressing this through 8,000 poo bags from the United States, containing chemicals that solidify waste and neutralise odour. Climbers attempting Everest and nearby Lhotse will be required to purchase the bags at base camp, use them above the base camp toilet facilities, and return them for checking. Considering the disgusting amount of money it costs to test your hubris on the mountain, a few extra dollars for poo bags seems like small change. These wag bags are already mandatory on peaks like Denali in the US and Aconcagua in South America, so why not here? “There’s nothing worse than getting into a high camp, looking out at the horizon at sunset and seeing dozens and dozens of frozen turds,” said Dr. Peter Hackett, a high-altitude researcher who also summited in the early 80s. Robert Kern To understand how Everest arrived at a human waste crisis, it helps to understand what Everest has become for the people generating that waste. The base camp experience available to well-resourced climbers these days includes large heated geodesic dome tents with queen-size beds, Persian rugs, electricity, and Wi-Fi. Gourmet meals prepared by Western-trained private chefs. Dedicated baristas for espresso (a guaranteed poo-nami maker). Full bars. Massage tents. The New York Times writes that the 2023 climbing season required 824 cylinders of liquefied petroleum gas, 18,935 liters of kerosene, and 5,130 liters of gasoline for cooking, heating, and powering about 1,600 tents at base camp. A study led by Khim Lal Gautam, Nepal's chief survey officer and a geospatial scientist, found that human urine is responsible for an estimated 154 tonnes of melt in the Khumbu Glacier. At altitude, the body demands more hydration, which means more output, and with more than 6,000 litres of urine produced daily by climbers and guides during peak season, the glacier is absorbing the consequences of every water bottle consumed on the way to the summit. Pit-vault toilets are hauled down the mountain after collecting deposits from 2,000 people. Very unglamorous indeed. But people don't keep it in the toilet. They urinate on the glacier too. An in the study, they found that Base Camp temperatures increased about twice as fast as elsewhere on the glacier. But our footprint can be even worse because their data did not include all the added luxuries like helicopters and yaks. Eryn Gordon is a US-based travel writer and founder of Earth To Editorial, who even delivered a TEDx talk about what it means to be a responsible traveller. She spoke to Bored Panda and said that "what surprises me the most is that people who appreciate and have the ability to organise an expedition to Everest are totally oblivious to the fact that the waste they leave behind will not disappear into thin air. I am guessing the same person who left trash on Everest would not do the same after a picnic in the park near their neighbourhood." factsofnepal The question of responsibility on Everest is one that multiple parties have spent years redirecting toward each other with considerable skill. The climbers point to inadequate infrastructure. The infrastructure points to inadequate enforcement. The enforcement points to absent government liaison officers, who are supposed to be present at base camps and have a documented history of not showing up. "The state has always been missing at base camps, leading to all kinds of irregularities, including people climbing our mountains without permits," says Mingma Sherpa. Casey TeVault, an avid hiker and outdoors advocate who has explored backcountry routes across North America, told Bored Panda that the failure as structural rather than purely behavioural: "Many visitors fail to follow the few rules that exist for waste disposal. But most locations do not provide sufficient infrastructure, and lack of enforcement means bad habits by individuals soon lead to complete failure of the system." The rules exist; the consequences for ignoring them have just not, historically, materialised. SummitClimb The poo bag pilot program is the first attempt to build a checking mechanism into the process rather than relying on voluntary compliance from people who have demonstrated, over decades, that voluntary compliance is not their strong suit. Bhupendra Adhikari, CEO of View Nepal Treks and Tourism and a former porter himself, understands the logistical reality from the ground up, and explained the nightmare to Bored Panda. "The biggest challenge at extreme altitudes is management and logistics. Normally there is no road accessibility in high altitudes, and it is very hard to transport things. They do not have options other than human resources and donkeys. It is not possible to lift by helicopter on a cost basis." Building waste processing facilities at altitude in extreme cold is not a straightforward proposition. But Adhikari also argues that the long-term solution requires a change in mindset across everyone involved: climbers, organisers, and field workers. "Not to produce waste in the high-altitude areas. High cost and penalties will be another solution to reduce the waste and its sources." I don't want to carry a bag of poop, but if I'm being honest, for the right price, I would. So let's pay the porters properly and sort this issue out! Gordon argues that "organizations and businesses that profit from visitors, and visitors themselves, should pay a fee.” “Tourism often creates a very unfair dynamic toward local communities. I think governments should enforce rules on heavy profiteers, then tourists, and also set aside funds to make sure Everest is cleaned." She suggests the elegant logic of a deposit return scheme: the amount of waste a climber brings back should be weighed and financially reimbursed. Anyone returning zero waste should pay an additional fee, on the basis that they left it somewhere on the mountain. This creates an incentive structure that does not rely on environmental conscience, which has proven insufficient, and instead relies on money, which has not. lakpa8848 Nepal's permit system is the mechanism through which the Everest tourism economy operates, and it is a mechanism that has been expanding its capacity faster than its consequences. The record permits issued in 2026 represent not just a revenue opportunity for the Nepali government, which charges $15,000 per climber for an Everest permit, but a compounding of every environmental problem the mountain already faces. More climbers mean more waste, more fixed ropes left in place, more abandoned equipment at altitude, and more pressure on the Sherpa community whose labour makes every summit possible. Not to mention, more bodies that act as route markers when they are left in the snow. The permit revenue flows to the central government. The environmental consequences land on the municipality, the local communities, and the mountain itself. Mingma Sherpa's announcement of the poo bag requirement came with a commitment to run a contact office at base camp and enforce the new measures directly, which represents a departure from the pattern of rules announced and not implemented that has characterised Nepali mountaineering governance for years. Mailee Osten-Tan / Getty Images Gordon proposes an educational component that should accompany any regulatory change: a mandatory fifteen-minute workshop for every Everest climber explaining what happens when they leave waste and how it affects the environment and local communities. "Responsibility sometimes has to be taught," she says, "and we should not just expect everyone to understand the full consequences of their actions." This is a reasonable position on which to land, and it is also, if we are being honest, a slightly dispiriting one. The people paying $50,000 or more for an Everest expedition and sleeping in a geodesic dome with Persian rugs probably have access to information about environmental impact. They have simply not been required to act on it. Hillary reached the summit on May 29, 1953, with Tenzing Norgay, after an expedition that began in March. There was no helicopter to base camp and no barista, but there was also no waste crisis, because there were not enough people on the mountain to create one. The achievement was singular because it was genuinely, functionally impossible for most of the people alive at the time. The democratisation of Everest summiting is not, in itself, a bad thing. People have every right to push their limits, and the Sherpa economy that has been built around expedition support has created generational wealth and opportunity in communities that needed both. The problem is not that more people climb Everest. The problem is that more people climb Everest while behaving as though the mountain exists for their personal use and will absorb whatever they leave behind without consequence. It will not absorb it. It is freezing it in place at 7,906 metres, concentrating it at South Col, and letting it thaw into the water supply when the temperature shifts. The mountain is an ecosystem, and it has been used as a very expensive toilet by people who could afford not to treat it that way. The poo bags are a start, and the financial penalties could be a step in the right direction, but only if it all gets enforced. This will only happen if the government treats the mountain as something other than a revenue source. In the meantime, the stink that Mingma Sherpa mentioned will leave us dry heaving a little, and then thinking about what happens when adventure tourism goes unchecked. We do not revere Everest anymore. We visit it, photograph it, leave our waste on it, and we fly home. Giphy
