- June 2015- Mike Marsolek of the Seattle engineering team visits Kathmandu University to set up bench scale biogas reactors with samples of Everest climbers’ waste at Kathmandu University. This project is critical to determining if antibiotics present in the climbers’ waste will inhibit or prevent biological formation of methane and destruction of pathogens. Although this toxicity question will be answered in months, graduate students at Kathmandu University will be completing all of this research project over the next 2 years. This lab work deepens the collaboration between the Seattle team and the people of Nepal and will help develop a network of technical support for the project once implemented.
Category: Design
Basis of Design document
This project faces the obstacles of a rugged and remote location, only fully occupied seasonally, the language barriers and cultural understanding of the team members involved and even proving the basic feasibility of such a difficult task. There are not only extreme technical requirements that must be consistently met in a wide range of conditions. There is a complex web of social networking and thoughtful planning that must be navigated as well. In the five years that volunteers have worked on this project we have attained design benchmarks as well as progress in our on-going discussion with the local community and organizations governing the Mt. Everest National Park.
A considerable amount of research and design has evolved throughout the course of this project, and not all preliminary work is documented on this website. For a more pointed view of this project’s technical process, the current design concept and its technical details are presented in the