Trash to Art: A Museum in the Himalayas
What do you do with hundreds of tons of trash at the base of Mt. Everest? You turn it into an art gallery.
A pinnacle of achievement in mountaineering is inarguably the submitting of Mt. Everest, known in Nepali as Sagarmatha and Tibetan as Chomolungma.
As impressive are the numbers surrounding the mountain. Straddling the border between Nepal and Tibet, the summit stands at 29,032 feet above sea level. Each year approximately 800 climbers attempt to conquer the mountain. The overall death rate is 1.2%, figured by the number of fatalities divided by the overall number of people on the mountain, not just those climbers who summit.
All of those climbers, and the thousands who support them, leave behind lots and lots of trash. In 2019, Nepal's government announced that a clean up crew hauled off over 24,200 pounds of garbage from what has been branded as the “highest garbage dump in the world.” Bigyan Dev Pandey, the Nepal Army spokesman, accounted within the trash “empty oxygen cylinders, plastic bottles, cans, batteries, food wrappings, fecal matter, and kitchen waste.”
The Himalayan Museum and Sustainable Park stepped in and launched Sagarmatha Next to discover and implement environmentally-sound solutions to address the issue.
The first step is a proposed creation of the Sagarmatha Next Center’s location where up-cycling best practices can turn trash into works of art. The idea is to employ local and foreign artists to create treasures out of the refuse, display them for awareness, and sell them to tourists to fund local conservation efforts.
“We want to showcase how you can transform solid waste to precious pieces of art … and generate employment and income,” project manager Tommy Gustafsson told Reuters.
A soft opening of the center will take place in the spring of 2021.
Another part of the initiative involves asking climbers to participate in a “carry me back” scheme. They are responsible for bringing a two-pound bag of trash back to the Lukla airport, a hub for visitors. From there, the trash will be flown to Kathmandu.
“So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.”
― George Mallory
Where is Mount Everest? Have fun by clicking below to explore the region.
“The way to Everest is not a Yellow Brick Road.” – John Krakauer
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