Garbage

The garbage man, er, men just left. And it was quite a production.

Where else has the detritus of my life been attended to by eight garbage men?

Not at Mom and Jerry's house, where there's two plus the driver.

Not in Yamanashi, where I burned my own trash in a barrel in the backyard.

Not in Salisbury, where a single truck driver would extend a robot arm from the side of the truck to lift and empty the garbage can.

But in Manila? Yes. Seven men came to our house each and every Friday to haul away our refuse.

I have to do some sorting of our recyclables ... aluminum in the green bin, paper in the orange bin, plastic in the yellow bin, that kind of thing. Then, dry trash is put into a green plastic bag and it's all put out on the curb for Friday collection.

It's a well-choreographed operation. Two guys walk alongside the truck, tossing trash bags and recycling containers onto the truck bed, where five guys sort and re-sort everything into appropriate piles...cardboard here, newspaper there, aluminum cans and plastic bottles in a plastic bag hanging off the back end of the truck. And, if you happen to accidentally put something that could be recycled into your trash bag, don't worry: They'll rip the bag open and make sure it's all in the right pile before heading down the street to the next house.

At the end, just to make sure the garbage collectors aren't missing anything, is a guy pedaling a bicycle behind the truck, picking up anything that didn't make it into the truck bed.

Kitchen waste goes out three days a week. We have a small, green bucket with a lid that holds apple cores, rotten lettuce leaves, mango peels, egg shells and anything else that can composted. Fortunately, they do pick this up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, as it could quickly become very smelly in the tropical heat.

So, what goes in the dry trash, you ask? Yeah, I wondered, too, since it seems like everything is either "recyclable" or "kitchen waste."

That's when I discovered that, placed right next to every single toilet in the house, is a small waste basket intended to hold, um, used toilet paper.

Our house is by no means unique. In fact, plumbing and sewage treatment systems across southeast Asia weren't designed to handle that decidedly Western concept called toilet paper. Traditionally, southeast Asian bathrooms came with a bucket of clean water to wash your backside with, meaning there was no need for a sewage system robust enough to handle toilet paper. (I don't know if this was true in the Philippines, or if the country's sewage infrastructure is just too old and fragile to handle toilet paper, but when traveling through the countryside in Vietnam a decade ago, I encountered a number of public restrooms that still employed the bucket of water method.)

Emptying the bathroom trash isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, especially since I mentioned to Shelly that it would make my job much easier if she would place her recyclable items next to the wastebasket, rather than in it. Emptying the kitchen waste is a far more unpleasant task: It only takes a few hours, in the heat, before the decomposition process begins.