Pollution at the top

Luc Boisnard, 53, is the founder of Ouest Acro. His company specialises in rope access and work at heights, including abseiling down monuments, buildings, dams, factories and nuclear power stations. He and his teams also work on mountain cliffs to prevent rockfalls, for example. Or at sea.

“Even though as a child I always picked up any rubbish I could find, my ‘professional’ history with pollution clean-up dates back to 1999, when the Erika* sank. For 2 years, we cleaned up inaccessible cliffs all along the Brittany coastline: Groix, Belle-Île, Saint Nazaire, Pornic… it remains the world’s biggest marine pollution clean-up project using ropes. We descended along the cliffs to clean them with Karcher, at the bottom we had absorbent systems, we recovered the pollutants, everything was brought up by winches and then evacuated by helicopter. 50 industrial climbers a day were spread out over the cliffs of the different sites. And then we started again with the Prestige**…”, explains the climber who has made his passion his profession.

In 2010, with his mid-life crisis looming (sic), he decided to “climb Everest”. “I knew it was very polluted, I’d seen some pictures, but I didn’t know where I stood. So rather than attempt Everest as a dry expedition and pay 25,000 dollars, I decided to organise a clean-up expedition.

Having managed to convince a few private sponsors to follow him, he reached the roof of the world and brought back 1 tonne of waste. “But we could have brought down 10 or 15 tonnes without any problem – it was a real disaster,” he says.

For the next 4-5 years, the mountaineer organised regular operations to clean up ditches in Mayenne, where he lives, with his cycling and walking friends. Collecting 450 kg the first year, 800 kg the second and 1.4 tonnes the last.

At the end of 2019, with the 50-year crisis approaching (re-sic!), he created the “Himalayan Cleanup” concept. His aim: to clean up one summit every two years. He was due to set off in 2020 on Makalu, the 5th highest peak on the planet, but Covid was passing through. Everything was cancelled. So in 2023, having fallen two years behind schedule, he decided to carry out two clean-up operations in parallel.

At the end of March, he launched a team on Annapurna***, while he set out to tackle Makalu.

 “On the Annapurna, 15 people cleaned up for 1 month; on the Makalu (8,485 m) there were 17 of us because the logistics were much heavier: we needed 1.5 tonnes of equipment for two months: tents, stoves, mattresses, food…”. No fewer than 50 people were needed to get up there.

“These days, it’s getting completely crazy: people pay up to 200,000 dollars to “climb Everest”, and at the base camp this year, there was a jacuzzi and a nightclub… it was just crazy! And 4G, of course, for selfies. And 2,500 people on average. This year there were 500 permits issued at 12,000 dollars to climb it. It’s a huge business. But up there, it’s the metro at rush hour! And queuing up to get to the top meant that some people froze on the spot because it was -45°C: they fell and there were 12 deaths this year”, laments Luc.

Despite all this overcrowding, it’s hard to imagine that this summit has actually become the highest open-air rubbish dump in the world. And yet it hasn’t! Contrary to what you might think, climbers and other extreme selfie enthusiasts have an environmental conscience that is inversely proportional to the layers of clothing that protect them from the extreme cold, and they don’t want to carry extra kilos when they have to climb over crevasses or descend the slopes. So they leave behind them empty oxygen bottles, tents, tinned food, various types of rubbish…

“The cause of this pollution is deep and distant”, explains our dashing fifty-year-old. The conquest of Everest began around a century ago. “Until the 2000s, the custom was to leave your equipment at altitude: you got rid of your heavy equipment on the mountain to come down more quickly. This was the norm, because we thought that nature would do its ‘natural cleaning’, just like at sea: by banging against the rocks, the last traces of oil from the Erika were erased by the waves. Except that with plastic pollution at sea, as with pollution at 8,000 metres, it doesn’t work like that: the waste is trapped in gangues of ice and we’re not about to see it disappear. It’s a freezer up there! So this pollution is very old AND very contemporary. Firstly, because the Nepalese don’t have this culture of bringing waste back down, but also because Westerners only have one thing in mind: their survival. So, they are indifferent to all other considerations”, explains the waste-remover mountaineer.

However, in the Everest valley, the SPCC – The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee – (Sagarmatha is the name of Everest in Nepalese), is active in the Sagarmatha national park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “The SPCC has set up waste collection systems all along the treks because 40,000 people go there every year. So there’s a real approach in this area”, continues Luc Boisnard, who nonetheless points the finger at the lack of infrastructure elsewhere: “In my trekking area, from the very first days, it was a disaster along the paths because people were throwing rubbish into nature. You have to realise that in Nepal, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, the main concern is to feed oneself. So the environment…”. The end of the month and the end of the world… it’s hard to reconcile ecology and economics.

By the end of the two expeditions in May, Luc and his teams had brought down a total of 4 tonnes of rubbish from the two summits, around half of which was plastic.

“Firstly, the visual pollution is dramatic. As for plastic waste, it cracks and transforms very quickly into microplastics”. Studies carried out in 2019 found microplastics at an altitude of 8,400 m, on the slopes of Mount Everest.

“Soon, I’ll be taking a closer look at another subject, which is sneaky and insidious, and that’s water pollution by human faeces. Because when you have 2,500 people in a base camp… these people have to relieve themselves! Even though it’s relatively well managed now – we pee on the glacier, but we have to go to the toilet with plastic bags for the excrement. All this is brought back by the SPCC and we pay $1/$1.50 a kilo for the waste, which is carried back down into the valley on the backs of yaks or men. The excrement is then spread out, particularly in the village of Periche perched at 4,371 m. In principle, you might think that this makes natural fertiliser, except that up there, everyone is eating corticosteroids, Doliprane or Diamox (to combat respiratory insufficiency or altitude sickness) among other things… And all this ends up in the excrement. With such mass tourism growing year after year, it’s obvious that groundwater pollution is being created. I intend to take scientific measurements from as high up as possible and study the quality of the water as I go down to the villages and rivers to study the impact.

“My next project is also to attempt K2 in Pakistan (8,611m, the world’s second highest peak). Camp II is very polluted because it’s a very dangerous mountain and as soon as anything goes wrong, the tourists run off and leave their equipment up there… I know someone who’s going to organise clean-up operations there. I’m going to see whether in 2025 I’ll be able to ‘complete’ what’s been started. I’m thinking of attempting an 8,000 again in 2025 because I’m a bit of a competitor at heart and it’s an extraordinary experience”, concludes the tireless globetrotter.

*On 12 December 1999, the Erika sank off the coast of Brittany, releasing 20,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. It was one of the biggest oil spills to hit France. This ecological disaster is thought to have killed between 150,000 and 300,000 birds.

**In November 2002, the oil tanker “Le Prestige” sank, spilling its cargo into the ocean: some 63,000 tonnes of fuel oil, an unprecedented disaster. Almost 3,000 kilometres of coastline in Spain, Portugal and France were polluted by the oil, along the Gironde, Landes and Basque coasts, where the oil slick arrived on the last day of 2002. Between 115,000 and 230,000 birds perished.

***Annapurna is a mountain range in the Himalayas of Nepal, comprising six main peaks, the highest of which, Annapurna I, rises to 8,091 metres, making it the tenth highest peak in the world.