Editor’s Note: Two days ago we welcomed Alexandra Smith to our growing writing team, and today we're very pleased to also add Steve Caratzas to the ranks. Some of you will know Steve from our friendly neighbourhood green blog - Ecotality (a good site to keep an eye on as well). Welcome Steve!

Fuji-san is less than sanitary

Mt. Fuji is Japan's highest point, a 12,388-foot volcanic mountain visited by 200,000 tourists annually, and the inspiration for countless poets and artists throughout the ages. It is also a massive garbage dump.

"We've found everything from household trash to broken TV sets and other appliances," said Mayumi Wakamura, who heads periodic cleanups of the mountain. "Sometimes we find hazardous materials like leaky old car batteries." - CNN

Wakamura's Fujisan Club, created in 1998 and 1,100 members strong, has gathered 187,000 pounds of garbage – all of it illegally dumped - from the mountain's environs in the 12 months through this past March. It remains unknown just how much trash pollutes Mt. Fuji, regarded by many as the symbol of the Japanese soul.

The problem is also symbolic, illustrating how years of environmental ignorance and neglect in a highly populated industrialized nation sadly diminished its most famous landmark. In the mid-1990s, activists sought to have the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) list Mt. Fuji as a World Heritage site. The trash issue nixed that effort, and the Fujisan Club was formed in response, organizing regular, day-long cleanups of the mountain.

While trash along the well-trodden paths is succumbing to the cleanup efforts, refuse dumped around the foot of the mountain by local businesses and residents is still a major concern, with debris buried deeply over the course of decades.

"I came here thinking we'd see bits of trash just lying around that we could easily pick up," said software developer Koji Nonaka, 43. "But they say that some of this stuff we got today had been there for 20 or 30 years. We really had to dig to get it out." - CNN

The dumping is difficult to monitor, and as a result, hard to prevent. Most dumpers are desperate to avoid Japan's garbage collection fees, which are considerable. Local governmental patrols and surveillance cameras are being used, but education is clearly the key.

"Picking it up is not enough -- people have to learn not to create so much in the first place," Ken Noguchi, mountaineer and environmental activist, told volunteers over the Internet in mid-April from Mount Everest, where he led an extensive cleanup campaign.

Noguchi, a Fujisan Club member, descended from Mt. Everest last month with 1,100 pounds of garbage.