Meanwhile, rubbish - 400 tonnes per day - piles up on the streets.
Think of Kathmandu and visions of three-tiered pagodas and medieval architecture used to come to mind.
Think again.
"We have nowhere to dump our domestic waste," says Mayor Keshav Sthapit, "and politics is making everything worse."
The mayor, a Communist, is in open disagreement with the national government, run by the centrist Nepali Congress party over what to do with Kathmandu's trash.
Politics
He wants to build a compost plant and recycle everything else.
The central authorities insist that they're behind the plan, but they have yet to grant land to build recycling facilities.
Meanwhile, rubbish - 400 tonnes per day - piles up on the streets.
The municipality caused outrage recently when it tried to dump accumulated garbage by the banks of the sacred River Bagmati, just upstream from the Hindu temple complex, Pashupatinath.
Demonstrations by local people have brought the dumping to a halt.
"We would have said 'No' at the beginning."
The smell, sight and public health threat is intensifying says Bharat Basnet, a leading travel agent and environmental campaigner.
"It's bad management. That's all," he says.
"It puts us in a very poor light and it will start to cost the country in money and in people's health."
Recycling
At a riverside site in Kathmandu's neighbouring municipality of Lalitpur, a group of middle-class housewives think they have the answer.
Since 1994, the Women's Environmental Programme, or Wepco, has been collecting household rubbish from 700 neighbourhood families and recycling almost all of it.
Yamuna Shreshtra wears an ornate blue silk sari as she stands ankle deep in garbage, supervising the making of compost for growing plants.
She laughs when she's asked about the smell.
"To me, it means growing things, healthy gardens. In just two months, we turn that smell into something useful."
Wepco also makes recycled paper and rag dolls from rubbish, and sells glass and metal waste, donating the proceeds to local charities.
The group's president, Sharada Vaidya, disagrees with Kathmandu's mayor that there's a political problem preventing the collection of rubbish.
"Who's fault is this mess," she asks, "It's ours, not just government, political parties or municipalities. If we separated our rubbish, used no plastic and recycled, then there would be no need for a rubbish tip. This is the only way forward."
Rising awareness
The main hope, according to many people in Kathmandu, is the rising level of environmental awareness among the young.
Teenage girls in a government college in Kathmandu's crowded Dili Bazaar recently stopped local traders and residents from leaving piles of rubbish on the street by singing songs and dancing while the dumping was going on.
And they're being trained by their teachers to take their activism home with them.
"Our schoolyard is the cleanest place in the neighbourhood," says sixteen year old Aruna,"and when we graduate from here, we'll behave the same way in the outside world."