The Mt. Everest Biogas Project is a small volunteer team of predominately engineers from the Seattle Washington area.
We share a vision/passion for improving the quality of life in extremely remote villages near Mt. Everest and its sister peaks, Pomori, Nupste and Lhotse. Our goal is to convert the human waste from their base camps into clean burning methane gas and organic fertilizer.
We are associated with the Puget Sound professional chapter of Engineers without Borders (EWB), the Mt. Everest Foundation for Sustainable Development in Nepal and Tibet (MEFSD) and Saving Mt. Everest 2011-2012 Project.
Saving Mt Everest 2011 – 2012 memorandum signing.
Our team is very pleased to announce that our project has teamed with the newly formed “Saving Mount Everest 2011-2012″ effort (viewable here).
A letter of understanding defining the project and its members was signed on March 23, 2011. This is a joint effort of several international organizations. The climbing industry is represented by several organizations, such as the Everest Summiteers Association of Nepal, Nepal Mountaineering Association and Eco Himal. On the government side of the project are the Nepal Ministry of Tourist and Civil Aviation and the Government of Nepal.
Under these agreements, the trash from the base camps is now disposed in environmentally correct manner, but the issue of human waste disposal has not been solved. We see the opportunity to create a real solution to the disposal problem. We have set out to design a biogas digester that will process the human waste material into usable products; methane gas and fertilizer. Such biogas digester systems are in place in Nepal and many other places world-wide. We face the challenge of building and operating a system at the Sherpa community of Gorak Shep. It has never been done at this altitude and temperature using only human waste.
