The Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal is the home of Mount Everest and attracts over eighty thousand visitors every year. This leads to tragic amounts of waste and puts pressure on the vulnerable ecosystem. Super Local and Sagarmatha Next are working together on the ‘Carry me back’ system. It involves local residents and tourists in the region carrying tons of waste back to Kathmandu, where it is recycled. Super Local processes water bottle caps into the ‘From the Himalayas’ collection: three pebble-shaped plastic stones and a scale model of Himalayan peaks. A perfect memento for tourists, with which they can continue to express their environmental responsibility at home. The proceeds finance the workshop and staff that form the foundations of this project.

‘What goes up, must come down’ is a law of nature that has not applied to waste on the Himalayas for a long time. Super Local came up with a solution that is as poetic as it is pragmatic by creating another downward waste stream. The user’s behaviour has been carefully considered and incorporated into the project; the bags are functional and at the same time a signal to fellow climbers. The pebbles generate a new, positive ritual. It would be good to see this system in many other places, such as festivals, diving spots and other natural reserves. From material stream to local processing, and from object design to circular financiering, this project is super Super Local: leading in complete and holistic process design.