A mountain of trash: China closes Everest for clean-up

Mount Everest, where the air is thin and climbing to the summit is a task to which few are equal, is a terrible place to organise a clean-up operation. But now China is planning to restrict access by climbers to the summit of what they call Mount Qomolangma to allow environmental teams to carry out a huge clean-up of the world's highest rubbish dump. Just weeks after the Olympic torch relay across the planet's highest peak, mountaineers are planning to scale it to clear the mounds of discarded tins, cans, bottles, oxygen canisters, rucksacks and even the occasional corpse of a climber. In 2007, 40,000 people visited Everest's Chinese northern side. While that is significantly fewer than the number that went up from the Nepali side to the south, they still managed to leave120 tonnes of rubbish. The Tibetan environmental... [read full story]