Travel sickness: visitors turning China's Qinghai Lake attraction into huge rubbish dump

Parts of China’s Qinghai Lake – a place of outstanding natural beauty that is one of the area’s most popular travel destinations – have been turned into huge rubbish dumps by visitors and local hotels and hostels, mainland media reports.

The problem is now threatening to harm the local environment as the number of tourists coming to the 4,317 sq km lake – the mainland’s largest – increases rapidly, Beijing Times reported.

Official figures show that there were 5,343 people who visited the lake, which has an average depth of about 21 metres, on the first day of this year’s week-long National Day holiday on October 1 – up by 20 per cent compared with visitors last year.

A large number of the visitors that bring food in plastic bags and polystyrene containers leave them behind when they leave, the newspaper reported.

However, the shortage of landfill sites for the disposal of rubbish in the area means that the vast quantity of the waste generated by visitors – and the hostels and hotels in the area, including thousands of plastic bags and polystyrene lunch boxes – are being dumped in newly dug pits beside the water’s edge.