[imagesource: Tenzi Sherpa]

Mountaineers have left the Himalayas in absolute shambles, with a few peaks turned into gigantic rubbish dumps.

In shocking new footage, you can see old discarded climbing and camping gear littering the mountain – the side the influencers totally ignore.

A conservationist on a mission to clean up the mountain range, Luc Boisnard, told The Times that rubbish has been thrown into glaciers where it will “re-emerge in 200 years’ time”.

The alpinist – who was part of an expedition that cleared out 3,7 tonnes of waste off Makalu, the world’s fifth highest summit and Annapurna, the tenth highest – founded Himalayan Clean-Up, a community clean-up campaign to raise awareness about Himalayan pollution, following a previous expedition in 2010 to remove a tonne of waste from Everest:

The Himalayas are “a real tip” with some summits resembling “gigantic rubbish bins”, the Frenchman said. “Behind every rock you find lots of oxygen bottles, tins, canvas and shoes. It’s really appalling.”

He said climbers not only left waste on the mountainside but often “threw it into the Himalayan glaciers, from where it will re-emerge” in the future. What a legacy to leave behind.

Watch Boisnard and his team trudging through heaps of waste, including plastic bottles, sanitation pads and abandoned tents.

The Independent notes that mountaineers pay a “garbage deposit” of thousands of dollars before climbing the summit of more than 8 000 metres. The money is refunded if the rubbish is returned when they come back down the mountain, but clearly, this is doing little to abate the devastating pile-up and people are more willing to lose their money than carry their load back down the mountain.

Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal Purja, featured in the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, which details his attempt to clean every peak higher than 8 000 metres so as to alert people to the issue of pollution in the Himalayas, per The Daily Mail:

Purja has launched the Big Mountain Clean-up project, and he and his team, Nimsdai, removed 500kg of waste from Manaslu two years ago, the world’s eighth-highest mountain.

According to Nimsdai’s website, the project ‘has a zero-tolerance approach to the waste being generated by the increasingly popular expedition culture which is now having a detrimental impact upon those living in and around the mountains.’

[sources:independent&dailymail]