Two lakh water, beer and other beverage bottles are reportedly left behind at Everest each year by the 17,000 trekkers and 600 mountaineers who pass through the Khumbu region of Nepal, says Lara Bozabalian, member of the Everest 2000 Educational Trek. She was quoted as saying that they are hoping to be able to work on the mountain 8-10 hours a day and each student will cart away an average of 7-8 kilograms of litter per trip.

The garbage will be collected in biodegradable burlap sacks, which will be dumped at landfill sites along mountain trails. Kunjar Sharma, Nepal's honorary consul-general in Canada, said the campaign would help protect the fragile environment of the Himalayas. ``I would like to share the natural beauty of Nepal with others,'' he said. The United Nations recently declared Everest and Annapurna as natural heritage sites and it means that these are ``precious to humanity and earth'', Sharma stated.

Earlier, Nepal did not charge anything for allowing expeditions, which apparently led to all sorts of people going up the Everest just for fun, and these people left behind bottles, cans and food, which would litter the mountainside and harm the fragile environment of the Everest and Annapurna ranges, Sharma said. The Nepalese government then started charging $70,000 per expedition for groups of seven people, he said. This also helped the government raise funds to keep the environment clean and also discouraged non-serious climbers from going to Everest, Sharma explained.

``Now the government advises people going for expeditions to follow conservation rules seriously to help preserve the environment, but even then, enforcement is difficult,'' he stated. But it has made them wary of violating rules that could result in negative publicity for them, not only in Nepal and their country of origin, but also in international arena through the international media, Sharma said.

A few years ago, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb the Everest in 1953 along with Tenzing Norgay, suggested that the Everest should be closed for five years for clean-up work. That was the wake-up call for all mountain climbers, Sharma said.

Students from Queen's University would be spending about Cnd$ 6,000 each on the expedition and are now busy raising funds for themselves by doing odd jobs. This will be the third group of students from Queen's University to go to Everest for clean-up work. ``We come and we work with the villagers to help them establish an infrastructure that can manage the new volume of waste,'' Jim Carson, 28, one of the co-founders of Canadian Youth Abroad, was quoted as saying.

-- IANS