Only Leave Your Ski Tracks This Winter

2nd December 2019

Tags: Switzerland

Only Leave Your Ski Tracks This Winter

The mountains in the winter take on a special beauty when carpeted under snow but many skiers don’t see the mess they leave behind when the snowline retreats in spring.  Respect the mountain environment, its wildlife and never leave anything behind except your tracks in the snow.

Lots of the tourist offices in an around the Alpine ski resorts organise days when they ask for volunteers to help in an organised litter pick up, often held on summer holidays dates to cash in on the popularity of mountain hikers. On average each of the volunteers picked up an incredible 5kg of plastic and other waste, left behind by us! In one Swiss ski resort, 200 volunteers organised by the lift operators and tourist office collected a combined tonne of waste in just one day!

Sadly it’s a product produced by one the skiing

“Cans of Red Bull are found fairly often now, whereas they used to be rare,” says Olivier Kressmann, project manager for Summit oundation, a non-profit organisation promoting environmental awareness in Switzerland. “And these days, paper tissues are more and more resistant, so the life-span of tissues on the pistes is increasing. That’s a new problem over the past two or three years.”

  • Paper towel – 2-4 weeks
  • Banana Peel – 3-4 weeks
  • Paper Bag – 1 month
  • Newspaper – 1.5 months
  • Apple core – 2 months
  • Orange Peel – 6 months
  • Ski inner cotton glove – 1 to 3 years
  • Woollen ski sock/hat – 1 to 5 years
  • Milk carton – 5 years
  • Cigarette butts – 10 to 12 years
  • Coke can – 200 years
  • Plastic bottles – 450 years
  • Plastic bags – 200 to 1,000 years

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