The Squalor and Splendor of Garbage > IDEAS & IDEALS

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Garbage speaks much more about us than we think it can. What we have and throw away can speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully than any professor of sociology can about us and the modern world. The idea that garbage is a useful source of cultural information about the past is hardly new. The kitchen middens and the sites of many archeological digs are, after all, rubbish heaps under another name, and the pottery shards, flint scraps, arrowheads, rusty knives that we look at in the museums are really just old garbage. It is certain therefore that we can learn something very useful about the modern world by scrutinizing its rubbish.

     Garbage doesn't lie. The garbage can I have under my desk in my office reveals inadvertently everything about me. The Melitta coffee filter bags, for example, announce to the whole world that I don't drink instant Maxwell anymore, and they also trumpet that I make more money and spend more on luxuries than before. And the papers. Newspapers, wrappers of all sorts, plastic bags, magazines mostly unread, sheets of high quality white papers with nothing written on them. These are thrown into my rubbish basket with nonchalant ease every day and hour. The contents of the written words and the pictures on them tell and show what we are and what I am. We are what we throw away.

     Once we did not throw away anything. We saved everything for later use and re-use. The word 'recycling' does not mean anything to us just decades ago. It was almost a grave sin, if not a crime, to throw away a spoonful of boiled rice or a sheet of brown paper. To throw away a pair of shoes worn out was unthinkable. It needed a hole in the middle of the sole large enough to let in a lump of earth everytime you moved your legs before they could be discarded with no qualm or pang of conscience. Nothing found its way to its eternal resting place with its whole body intact. An old umbrella apparently past use had to undergo a rigorous anatomy and autopsy in order to die for good.

     The fact that we produced little or no garbage in the past does not guarantee that we lived with better or higher moral standards. It simply says that we were poor. The same truth and logic can be applied to the assertion that we were more diligent in the past than now. We were not. We worked harder in order to escape from poverty. Poverty is no good standards by which the virtue of true diligence or of thrift can be tested or measured. Forced virtue is virtue no longer.

     Garbage in our time is many a splendid thing. It's no wonder so many people are attracted to the garbage dump and make their living in and around and with it. You are grossly mistaken if you assume that it is just a squalid place and only the forsaken and miserable people live in Nan Ji Do, the time-honored dumping place in Seoul for the last several decades. On the contrary, it is a very exciting place full of business, life and hope. It is a treasure island for the hundreds of poor people making their livelihood there by sorting and ransacking the debris and waste brought to the place everyday and every hour. It provides them with work, job, hope and future. They also send their children to school and save money. And more often than not some of them hit upon a fortune, a real treasure, a big stack of cash or a big real diamond necklace, thrown away by mistake or for some unknown reasons. Like the people ranging the steep mountainsides in search of the invaluable, cure-for-all, natural ginseng roots, these people lead a poor and laborious life, but also very thrilling and exciting one.

     Some of us may think that we, the people of the 20th century, only produce garbage causing serious problems for us. That is not true. There has always been garbage, and almost always a lot. I have read somewhere that the street level of the ancient city of Troy rose almost 5 feet per century as a result of debris accumulation. Present-day street levels on the island of Manhattan, New York, are said to be 6 to 15 feet higher than they were in the 17th century; The increase continued until 1895 when the city began to undertake systematic garbage removal. I remember the back streets of Seoul were mostly dirtier and uglier decades ago than now with the briquette ashes even when we did not have much to throw away.

     The landfill or the garbage dump is the very place where all the brothers and sisters of garbage end their journey and find their eternal resting place: the junk-food wrappers, liquor bottles, pornographic magazines, paper cups, plastic bags, molded plastic or iron forms, disposable diapers, crushed aluminum cans, food scraps, fruit peels, clothes, shoes, of all sizes, colors, shapes, and conditions. Like man, some are cremated and some of them are buried under the ground. What, then, makes up the biggest portion of garbage? Not surprisingly, in an information age, it is paper, and newspapers alone constitute more than half of it. The runner-up is, surprisingly, construction debris.

     The problem with these dead bodies in the garbage dump is that they don't decompose easily and quickly. Instead of being decomposed or biodegraded many of these become mummified, and the pace of decomposition or biodegradation is measured in centuries, not decades. Newspapers, for example, remain intact and perfectly legible even after several decades. Even organic materials, such as food scraps, remain unchanged after 30 or 40 years. I have read an account of archeological excavation of an ancient Roman garbage dump in which the smell of putrefaction remained unbearable even after 2,000 years.

     Of course, we should all learn and try to reduce our production of waste and encourage our best effort to preserve our natural resources and protect our nature, but apparently there is no cause for an apocalyptic pessimism over someone's crying out, "garbage crisis". The quantity and quality of the garbage we produce is simply what we are. Go to some poverty-stricken countries in the world, collect their garbage, study and compare it with ours, and then you will realize how really poor they are. I cannot forget the thrill and excitement I experienced when I rummaged through the garbage dump left by the American soldiers during the Korean War. For me it was literally a treasure dump. We have it now at Nan Ji Do, and it is full, they say, and we are seeking another dumping place elsewhere. A good news to be savored, not to be lamented.
          (October 23, 1992)