Filed for The Guardian, 01 February 1993
There are a semi-wild pigs along the famous Chiang Mai trail in Thailand that eat the excrement that Western trekkers leave behind. Domestic chickens along the route around Annapurna in Nepal do the same.
Unfortunately in Britain there are no animals prepared to perform such heroic recycling. Which is a pity, because it would have provided at least part of an answer to a delicate problem now beginning to worry conservationists and mountaineers: how do we prevent some of the wildest and most beautiful high mountain areas from being polluted by human waste?
The issue has been graphically raised in the latest journal of the Mountain Bothies Association, a hardy gathering of souls who enjoy staying in remote huts without any facilities. Increasing numbers of bothies in Britain, as well as popular high-level climbs and camping sites, are being spoiled by too many people “shitting wild”.
A Devonshire walker, David Hillebrandt, recounts his “anal awakening” looking for a suitable toilet site while camping on the lip of Cwm Idwal in Snowdonia. “I turned a stone and discovered its secret - a wad of semi-decayed faecal matter held together with strands of paper mache. I dropped the stone with a tongue-turning squelch and moved on,” he writes.
“Five minutes later, and one hundred and fifty yards from my idyllic campsite, I finally found a pristine plinth, rested my back against a boulder, enjoyed the view and put some effort into my own bit of organic pollution.”
The journal’s editor, Dave Minter, urges urgent research to discover whether faeces in frozen upland environments decay at a greater rate then they are deposited. If not, he warns, “then eventually we’ll be up to our necks in the solids!”
Schoolboy humour aside, the dangers are serious: health hazards from polluted water, ecological damage to plants, spoiled views and unpleasant smells. The difficulty is knowing what to do.
There are bewildering array of possible solutions, many of them distinctly unappealing. In some American wilderness areas the backpackers’ code urges them to carry out their excreta in self-sealing plastic bags. There is a profusion of advice on how and where to dig holes.
One school of thought insists that used toilet paper should all be burnt or removed. Others suggest the development of quickly biodegradable paper or the adoption of the kind of paper-free cleaning methods common in the developing world - fingers and water. Self-constipating drugs have even been mentioned.
The government’s conservation agency, Scottish Natural Heritage, is examining whether there are any low-tech, low-cost toilet designs that might be suitable for remote locations. But since they are likely to be frozen solid for a large part of the year and almost impossible to maintain, this is quite a challenge.
“The extent of the problem can be enormous depending on the place and the time of year,” said Denis Mollison, the chairman of the Mountain Bothies Association. He estimated that it was particularly acute around up to a dozen bothies, particularly in the Cairngorms in Scotland.
Because of growing concern expressed by members, the association will be considering at its next meeting whether there is any practical action it can take. “We are looking for ideas,” said Mollison.