Exclusive:
An influx of tourists at major natural destinations is causing a huge issue due to the amount of litter and human excrement being produced, leaving experts to ask ‘is there still time to save these destinations?’
Much-loved tourist destinations across the world are reaching a crisis point as travellers dump more than just litter when visiting.
Gavin Bates, director and mountain leader at Adventure Alternative, has been running adventure trips to iconic locations for decades. But now, these destinations have reached a crisis point as they have become overwhelmed by human waste and litter.
“The issue of both litter and human waste has been a visible issue for all of that time. But each individual place has gone through its own journey of managing the phenomenal rise in waste, directly in tandem with the phenomenal rise in visitors,” said Gavin.
“Some did nothing, some did a lot. The visible rise if you look at it like a graph started off slowly but the curve got steeper very quickly as tourism spiralled.”
Having climbed Kilimanjaro over 100 times since 1989, Gavin has seen first hand the growing problem of human waste. He advises visitors to follow park guidelines, use long-drop toilets, and place sanitary products in the bucket often provided or carry it with them. “On Kilimanjaro, 50,000 visitors a year produce 12.5 tonnes of poo. It’s better in pits than scattered along paths,” he said. “[Don’t] take a poo anywhere you want, put some paper under a rock and think nobody will notice.”
With vast amounts of human excrement and litter left in parks and on mountain paths, the negative impact is mounting. “Rubbish is litter dropped on the ground, and in most of these places, there are no recycling facilities… so it’s just left to be ‘someone else’s problem,’” said Gavin.
The waste also impacts fragile environments, as at high altitudes, it decomposes slowly and can often contaminate streams and rivers which are used for drinking water. “Visitors from rich countries don’t think about the journey of their poo once they flush a toilet, because we’re used to having treatment plants and regulations,” stated Gavin.
“The impact is huge, the resources are minimal, the will to tackle the problem — often not there.”
When asked by the Mirror if he thought overtourism was the issue, Gavin simply said: “Overtourism has just made the problem undeniably ‘in your face’.”
Whilst the issue has been around for as long as tourism has at these destinations, “you can’t avoid seeing it now because there’s so much of it”. For example, on Kilimanjaro visitors used to poo anywhere and “every bush and tree was garlanded with strips of used toilet paper that the crows were picking up”. Staff who slept in the caves also went to the toilet anywhere and everywhere.
It wasn’t until recently that the park invested in toilet blocks and enforced park rules, as the number of visitors exceeded 50,000 per year. “Why? To protect the revenue,” added Gavin. “In Nepal the parks never really bothered introducing rules, it was only when tourists themselves complained that they started to think about these issues.”
Gavin also questioned what ‘overtourism’ even is, as it is “just tourism”, noting how the broader issue is systemic: governments, park authorities, tour operators, and tourists all share responsibility. “Tourism and the human waste it produces, and in those quantities, compromises the natural process,” he stated.
“At its core this is just another case of money versus ethics. Think of the number of people who benefit financially from a tourist going to climb Kilimanjaro. It’s an industry, and only now – far too late – is society understanding the implications and trying to reconcile decades of business with the horrible reality that we’ve just ruined it all. The big question is – is there still time?”
Gavin calls for education, investment, and regulation to address the problem. “We need to ask the question ‘Why do we have this business of tourism in the first place?’ To just make money, or to use the money generated from tourism to educate people about the wonder and fragility of our world and to motivate people to protect it,” he concluded.
