Everest Just Had Its Busiest Climbing Season Ever. Climbers Also Left Behind 90,000 Kilograms of Trash.

Two records were set on the south side of Everest this spring, and they belong to each other. The 2026 season was the busiest ever recorded on Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse combined, with 701 climbers active on the three peaks. By the time the last team packed up base camp, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) had also hauled down its largest single-season waste total on record.

The number is not just a byproduct of more people on the mountain — it is also the first real result of a policy change. For years, garbage above Camp 2 was the mountain's hardest problem: oxygen canisters, tent fabric, food wrappers and worse pile up at Camp III and the South Col season after season, because an exhausted climber descending from 8,000 metres in a storm is never going to detour to pick up someone else's rubbish. This spring, for the first time, SPCC stationed rangers at Camp II specifically to check that descending climbers were carrying down waste from the high camps, not just meeting their quota with rubbish already sitting lower on the mountain. The Nepal government backed it with a rule, approved by the Ministry of Tourism on SPCC's recommendation, requiring every climber to bring down at least two kilograms of garbage from above 6,400 metres before reaching base camp at 5,350 metres.

Where the waste actually came from

The scale only makes sense against the last decade. A Nepali Army-led cleanup expedition in 2019 spent 45 days hauling roughly 11,000 kilograms of trash off the upper mountain — and recovered five sets of human remains exposed by thinning ice. A follow-up army campaign in 2024 removed a further 11 tonnes from the death zone, where retreating glacier ice is now surfacing decades of debris and bodies buried since the 1950s. Those were short, intensive campaigns aimed specifically at the highest camps. What is different in 2026 is that a full season's routine collection, working alongside the new carry-down rule, out-hauled either of them on its own.

What this means for trekkers

SPCC's next target, mountain officials have said, is closing the same gap on Lhotse and Nuptse's shared upper routes, where waste patterns mirror Everest's. For a mountain that receives more climbers every year, the 2026 season is the first real evidence that the trash problem can shrink even as the crowds grow — as long as someone is stationed at Camp II checking.

Sources: The Himalayan Times reporting on the SPCC 2026 season cleanup total and the Camp II ranger programme; Nepal Ministry of Tourism garbage carry-down regulation.

Cover photo: Sangyam adventurer via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).