Beat plastic pollution: coming full circle with our trash in the high mountains

The tourist season is at its peak in the hill stations and high mountains across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region as the scorching summer unfolds its arms. I remember last year, just as the snow was melting and summer was beginning, my colleagues and I were trekking to Laya – the highest settlement in Bhutan at an altitude of 3,800 metres above sea level (masl). Laya lies within the Jigme Dorji National Park, the country’s second largest park, situated in Gasa Dzongkhag, northwestern Bhutan. We drove from Thimphu via Gasa up to Tongchudrak where the road ends. We started the rest of the journey by foot. 

I was very excited as we passed through the scenic beauty of natural and cultural manifestations. However, I was also quite surprised to see scattered plastic waste that people had left behind along the walking trails, even in such a remote and otherwise pristine place. When we asked our guide about it, he explained that the litter is mostly caused by local tourists and residents. Over time, their eating habits have changed, with growing consumption of packaged food and beverages, resulting in an increase in plastic waste in the area.  

It was disheartening to see the mountain landscape marred by scattered multi-layered plastic wrappers, bottles made of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) and heaps of glass bottles. Along the trails, there were small open pits which had been dug for waste disposal, but they were often left exposed, with trash blown away by the wind. In some of these open pits, I also saw trash being openly burned. Just before we entered the village, there was a huge pile of mixed degradable and non-degradable waste dumped beside the river. I said to myself that I must at least collect the waste along the walking trails on my way back, which I decided to do.  

Before leaving Laya, I obtained a couple of large sacks from a local shop owner. With one of my friends, I picked up single-use and multi-layered plastic wrappers (mostly from chocolates, chips, chewing gum, biscuits and other snacks), PET bottles, beer cans, and energy drink glass bottles scattered along the trails. As we collected the waste and walked down from Laya, the sack grew bigger and heavier; it was difficult to carry, but our determination did not waver. We brought back about 14 kilograms of waste just from the walking trail alone on our journey from Laya to Gasa. Most of the waste collected was PET bottles (e.g. soft drinks like Coke, Fanta, Pepsi) followed by beer cans, and juice tetra packs.  

Waste problems in the mountains

The above scenario resembles the fate of many other tourist destinations, religious sites and trekking routes across the HKH region. In our rapid assessment of solid waste management in high-mountain protected areas in Nepal, we found that almost 60% of the waste is biodegradable, which is often either fed to animals, buried, or used to make compost. Meanwhile, non-degradable waste is either openly dumped near rivers or burned, contaminating water sources and polluting the air, which directly or indirectly affects human health and biodiversity. 

In the Indian Himalayan Region, the ‘Himalayan Cleanup’ campaign is a local movement that began in 2018 with the aim of addressing the waste crisis. The Himalayan Cleanup’s annual waste audit found over 75% of plastic waste collected in 2024 was non-recyclable.  

In the HKH mountains, almost 45% to 60% of waste is degradable, while non-degradable waste accounts for a minimal quantity, and its effective recycling is always a challenge. Onsite waste recycling is not economically viable unless waste is aggregated. The aggregation and transportation of waste, particularly plastics and glass bottles from the mountains is very expensive. If the plastics are not compacted, transporting them to a recycling facility becomes very costly too. Likewise, handling and transporting glass bottles from mountainous terrain is very difficult, and at many places, heaps of such bottles are simply piled up and left. Transporting this waste is even more expensive due to the challenging geographical terrain and lack of motorable roads. However, in some places such as in the Everest and Annapurna regions of Nepal, local communities and hoteliers have voluntarily banned glass beer bottles, opting instead for aluminium cans which can be crushed before aggregation and then recycled. 

Informal waste workers and rag pickers play a crucial role in waste collection and segregation for recycling, but there is a huge challenge in aligning them with a formal network and ensuring their occupational health and safety. In many cases, these informal workers are from outside the province or state and the local governments do not recognise their role for incentivisation.  

Beating plastic pollution: layers of complexity

Non-degradable waste should be further segregated based on type and characteristics. For example, a plastic soft drink bottle uses three distinct types of plastic – the bottle itself is made from Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), the bottle cap is made of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) and the label wrapper is made from Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE). PET and HDPE are highly valuable plastics and easily recyclable, whereas LDPE is characterised by low-density molecules, which is cheap to produce but not easily recycled. Single-use plastic bags, all kinds of packaging wrappers, coating on containers and bottles, and garbage bags are all LDPE plastics, whereas multilayered plastics have thin sheets of various other materials laminated together (including aluminium, plastics, and paper) and are difficult to separate. 

LDPE and multilayered plastics are becoming a serious problem with rapid industrialisation and increased consumption of processed food resulting in consumers dumping these plastics all over the pristine mountain landscapes. Many recyclers do not use these plastics as the recovery process is difficult and costly.  

As described in the situation in Laya, the dietary habits and consumption patterns of mountain people across the Himalayas are shifting towards processed and packaged foods. This has heightened the waste problems which are further exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure and lack of mountain-specific, simple and affordable waste management technologies. For example, sophisticated, modern and artificial intelligence (AI)-based waste management technologies available in the market, such as smart bins, waste-sorting robots, automatic high voltage bailer machines for waste compaction or even incinerators may not be suitable in the mountains unless they are portable, energy efficient, easily operated and maintained, and are customised to the local context depending on the waste characterisation and quantity.  

Waste solutions in a circular economy

The solutions to waste management should go beyond ‘end-of-life management’ – when a resource is no longer usable but could be recycled or upcycled towards a circular economy, whereby we can keep reusing the resources, creating a value from what could otherwise be considered waste. Here we outline some waste management solutions for the mountains: 

• Waste segregation at source: Separating degradable and non-degradable waste at the source is a first step to sustainable waste management. The degradable waste can be composted using traditional methods or using other modern options such as vermi-composting (using worms), on-site pit or bin composting, or using aerated pile composting where air circulation helps faster decomposition. 
• Waste collection site and material recovery facility (MRF): An MRF is a simple waste collection facility where all kinds of non-degradable waste are segregated. This is to recover the useful resources from waste so it can be recycled or upcycled separately to boost the local economy. The establishment of MRFs at strategic locations is the most viable option for non-degradable waste segregation and recycling. 
• Banning single use plastics: In India, the implementation of the Plastic Waste Management Amendment Rules 2021 effectively imposed a ban on the manufacture, importing, stocking, distribution, sale and use of single-use plastic carry bags with a thickness of less than 75 microns effective from 30 September 2021.  
• In Nepal, Kathmandu Metropolitan City imposed a ban on single-use plastic bags with thinness below 20 microns in April 2013, but this action was put on hold after the Supreme Court’s stay order. Although the court later ruled in favour of the Metropolitan City, the ban has not yet been effectively implemented. There should be stringent policy implementation and effective monitoring to ban single-use plastics while also providing alternative sustainable solutions to it. 
• Local initiatives to waste management: Initiatives such as the “carry me back” campaign in trekking routes in the Everest region is a successful model where tourists voluntarily carry waste bags to the nearest airport, from where it is transported to Kathmandu and a private-sector company collects it for recycling. This model can be replicated in other high-mountain, remote settlements with difficult terrain to successfully demonstrate how to segregate waste and transport it to recycling facilities.  

Similarly, the local community-driven zero waste campaign, ‘The Himalayan Cleanup’ across the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), is a clear example of a bottom-up approach to decentralised waste management and plastic recycling. In April 2025, several organisations across the IHR created the ‘Zero Waste Himalayan Alliance’ to tackle the reported 80% of single-use plastics from food and beverage packaging.  

• Using plastic waste for road construction: This is a solution being pioneered in Bhutan, India, and Nepal to reuse all kinds of non-recyclable plastics. Even LDPE and multilayer plastics can be used for this purpose which reduces plastic waste in landfill sites and minimises the cost of road construction. The Green Road initiative in Bhutan has successfully blacktopped 157 km road using 830 tonnes of plastics. This replaced 780 tonnes of bitumen imported from India, a carbon-intensive raw material derived from crude oil, for road construction.  
• Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) calls on companies and manufacturers to take responsibility and accountability for the waste they generate, particularly in the mountains, as waste management is cost intensive. Policies and guidelines need to be developed to implement EPR. In India, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change published its ‘Guidelines on Extended Producer Responsibility on plastic packaging as Plastic Waste Management Amendment Rules 2022, which provides a framework to strengthen the circular economy. 

Ways forward to incorporate waste in the circular economy

A World Bank report on solid waste management from 2018 projected that global waste generation is expected to rise 3.40 billion tonnes annually by 2050, a drastic increase from the current 2.01 billion tonnes. To curb this scenario and to bring systemic changes to effective waste management, our efforts should be threefold: 

1. Individual level: a change in behaviour and consumption patterns adopting the 5R principle: rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse, and recycle. 

2. Societal level: waste segregation at source and a communal voice for waste disposal at strategic collection points for its effective management. 

3. Policy level: stringent policy and its effective enforcement with extended producer responsibilities to make the plastic producers accountable to waste generation and management. 

In addition, there should be: 

• stricter rules and monitoring to ban the production, importing, sale, distribution and use of single-use plastics. 

• more awareness and education campaigns that are carefully designed and sustained for shifts in behaviour and mindset, aiming to achieve long-term systemic change in attitude and corresponding actions. 

• financial sustainability, which is a key to sustaining waste management actions; local governments should ensure this through user fees collection, corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds, and generating revenue from recycling and circular economy approaches.  

There is still hope as we strive to maintain and protect cleaner and greener surroundings where our future generations can thrive healthily and coexist with nature. To mark this World Environment Day 2025, let us promise to #BeatPlasticPollution, let us nurture our mother Earth and let us serve the majestic Himalayas to sustain its crucial ecosystem services flows.  

Acknowledgement
Sabitri Dhakal
Gillian Summers
Barsha Rani Gurung
Samuel Thomas