As it essentially only caters to the wealthy, I am not shocked. Make it $50k, not like they won't want to climb Everest.

Close the mountain. If you can't take care of it, you don't deserve to get to climb it.

hear me out.

only rich dumbasses climb Everest. $4000 is just the fee to climb on top of the regular fee to them.

instead of charging a fee, make it a requirement to return with x pounds of trash or face jail time.

When you're paying over 50k to climb the mountain anyway, an additional 4k isn't very much.

Make the deposits higher, then pool the deposits of those that fail to meet the requirements. Then at the end of the year award the pooled money to the climbers who returned the most trash. As someone else said gamify it…

Double or triple the deposit. That might help.

Wow, never been within many thousands of miles of Everest, but I'm quite frankly shocked by that "50 tonnes" estimate. Yikes!

I wonder at what altitude this is, like is it piled up near a bunch of camps towards the base, or higher up?

I always pictured it more akin to a much more vertical Antarctica or something.

That's really sad. :(

The rich would never go near a municipal dump, much less climb a literal mountain of garbage... Unless it's located in the highest point in the world, then they'd happily pay for the privilege.

How much waste they take up with them?

If it's more than 8kg, I'm guessing that the only missing requirement for the refund is to increase the number to make it that every climber brings down more than they take up.

In other words, put every climber on the scales before they go up and unless they weigh more when they come back, they don't get their money back.

Bonus reward for each extra kg.