Garbage in Korea

My fellow blog readers. What is garbage? It is waste. Yes, that’s it. Here in the land of the sound of sucking duk (see previous post if you're confused), we have different waste. One style of waste is food. It goes in the yellow bag (see picture). If I vomited into that yellow bag, would that be considered food waste too? Hum. The next bag is everything else which goes in the larger white bag. The latter makes it difficult to squeeze those hefty 2 liter water bottles in and any miscellaneous card board you have. You can really go through a lot of those white bags quickly with the amount of waste I generate. And Palmer is a waste machine! Just recently I went through a whole box of two-ply tissues from my snot factory of a nose. Jesus! What snot production! Buy some Kleenex stock, please!

Back to garbage: you must buy both the yellow and white bags at the local convenience store. Not all convenient stores carry these special bags. Why call them convenience stores, eh reader? Get to the point, Palmer! I am busy and you’re rambling on like your old ‘69 Dodge on Highway 1 going to the “Cruz” for some hippie supplies, if you know what I mean.

If you get caught not using these special and expensive bags, you can be fined a considerable amount! I’ve heard that the fine could be $1,000USD. Yep! Well, I watched the refuse custodian load his truck last week and made this quick observation about those two style garbage bags here in Korea:

If the garbage man throws all the white and yellow bags in the truck together, you know, the kind we have in the US, it mashes up everything by compacting vis a vis hydraulics, and then how do they separate the bags later on? How does this work? Is there a group of people at the dump who go through the garbage separating the big white bags from the small yellow bags? How can they do that when that monster size truck has compacted them into a mash of white and yellow bags? Why bother having these expensive bags if they all get mixed and burned together anyway? I hope for the next blog installment, I can find out the truth. The truth is out there (X Files reference). Reporting from the dumps of Korea, this is Palmer in Korea. Remember to separate your waste, it's good for you and the environment.

Follow up on garbage: April 4, 2008
The yellow "food" bags are buried like compost and the white "everything else" bags are burned, set on fire. How do they separate them at the dump? I guess I have too much time on my hands wondering about garbage! :)