Cleaning up a glacier

Mont Banc: photo Jean Didier Risler/AFP

The "Mer de glace" glacier on Mont Blanc receives an annual clean-up by volunteers and this year two tonnes of rubbish was collected, making a total of 20 tonnes since the exercise began in 2008.
Nowadays climbers are asked to bring down as much stuff as they take up, so much of what the volunteers gather is not recent. The glacier continues to yield items that were left years ago, including a passport that expired in 1960 and many pieces of wood which were presumably part of building projects by local climbers or farmers.
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