There’s a 14-tonne ‘faecal time bomb’ on Mount Everest. Here's one man’s idea to defuse it

Every year, some 1,200 people make a mad dash for the summit of Mount Everest during the climbing season that begins in May – taking on the arduous, often congested route to the world’s highest peak that most will not complete and some will not survive.

Working against them: temperatures far below zero, altitude sickness with effects that range from disorientation to death, and the ever-present threat of frostbite. More than 200 corpses of ill-fated climbers line the mountain’s slopes, a constant reminder of those climbers’ fatal missteps.

So it should probably come as no surprise if people traipsing up a mountain with its own death zone don’t give too much thought to one particular question: What should we do with all this poop?

In the roughly two months that it takes to climb Mount Everest, the average alpinist will have produced nearly 27kg of excrement. This season, porters who work on Mount Everest carried down 14 tonnes of human waste from base camp and other locations. It has been dropped into earthen pits on Gorak Shep, a frozen lake bed near a village 5,200 metres above sea level.

If not handled properly, the frozen fecal matter will spend years despoiling one of the wonders of the world. As Grayson Schaff, an editor for Outside magazine wrote in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece: “The peak has become a faecal time bomb, and the mess is gradually sliding back toward base camp.”

It is a problem Garry Porter, of Washington state, is well aware of. He’s a retired engineer who got more than 6,100 metres up the mountain in 2003 before too-strong winds forced his climbing party to turn back. He’s spent a good chunk of his retirement thinking about Everest – and about how to clean it up.