Her initiative began 4 years ago when she set up ‘Clean Everest’ project in 2016, which worked towards cleaning up tons of trash people leave behind while climbing the peak. 

In 2019, Marion won the ‘Terre de Femmes’ award given out by the ‘Fondation Yves Rocher’. She has climbed the summit thrice ever since she began the project and collected 8.5 tons of rubbish, which equates to nearly three-quarters of all the rubbish that had accumulated on the mountain.

My goal is to finish cleaning up Everest, so I can roll the process out across the entire Himalayas.

After she became the first European woman to climb Everest three times in 2018, she started noticing the things climbers often left behind in the 30 years of expedition – cans, jars, tubes of toothpaste, tent cloths, etc. 

In her journey to clean-up the Everest, she is accompanied by a local team of 50 guides. She also has a ‘mountain environmental protection charter’ to train sherpas and guides. In 2017, the local authorities provided her team with around 50 yaks to make it easier for them to get the hundreds of bags of waste down the mountain.

Born into a farming family and growing up in a house in the middle of the woods in the Dordogne region of France, Marion says that without nature she doesn’t feel alive. Her vision has made a drastic difference to the Everest. Ever since her project began, International mountaineers have been asked to bring down at least eight kilos of waste at the end of every expedition. And if they don’t, they’re fined.

Her exceptional work has helped preserve one of the world’s finest peaks. Not just for tourism purposes but also from an ecological standpoint. Marion’s exponential initiative is a change we wish to see at all tourism spots across the world.