Piled on the edge of the curb was a mountain of garbage. This was the detritus for a number of shops and 'love hotels' and restaurants and low-rise apartments in the immediate vicinity over the last day or two. Dumpsters are, for the most part, unheard of, although there lidded upright plastic bins, always overflowing with rotting matter, for organic waste. Garbage collection here is not funded by taxes or fee collection - it's user-paid in the most instrumental of ways. In order to have your garbage collected, you have to buy surprisingly expensive garbage bags, available in various sizes, which you then stuff to their absolute limit, and put on the street in haphazard piles for pick up. The revenue from the bags pays for the garbage collection service, is the thinking. Anything larger, and you have to take a trip to the local ward office and buy a sticker to slap on the item, again to pay for the hauling away.

The unintended consequences, of course, are manifold. Public garbage bins are rare outside of downtown Seoul, for example. Who's going to pay for it? Not me! tends to be the normal response. When you charge someone for the very act of discarding waste, they'll find a free way to do it: litter on the street, drop regular plastic bags of trash in front of the place two doors down when nobody's looking. Drive your sofa or fridge a few kilometers down the highway in the middle of the night and toss it out on the roadside. Once a pile develops (always on the same unmarked corners, despite an absence of any 'pile the trash here' signs), feel free to drop whatever unwrapped garbage you like on top, without bothering to buy one of those expensive bags.

So, I was standing there, and the garbage truck pulled up. Not unlike what one might see in Canada or America or Australia, with the requisite couple of sunburned guys hanging off the back with wiry, ropy-veined forearms. Where it diverged from the expected is that they didn't just hurl the bags into the back, they sorted the trash! They made sure all the cans went into can bags, plastic with plastic, and *shudder* organic stuff into the organic bags, and so on. After it had all been sorted, the driver came over with a large whisk broom, swept the leftover detritus into the gutter, and off they went, presumably to the next reeking pile.

Labor is very very cheap here. The cheapness of labor has all manner of consequences, of which this is just one. And there's not a lot of room for landfills chockablock with random crap. It makes sense, but it's just....that....different enough to make you think twice.