Come rain or shine, hardy breeds of scavenger-labourers can be found scouring the rubbish bound for the 'smoky mountain' landfill of Tseung Kwan O, looking for anything that may bring a buck. Whatever their motives, they consider themselves green crusaders neglected by an ungrateful government.
Every 17 seconds from 8am to 11pm, seven days a week, 365 days a year, a truck passes over the weighbridges at the end of the snaking Wan Po Road. Journey's end for this relentless flow is a huge, stinking hole wedged between a string of man-made hills and the reclaimed land housing the gleaming industrial estates of Tseung Kwan O. It is the Southeast New Territories landfill (called SENT), the biggest of Hong Kong's three landfills. Every day, 8,000 tonnes of waste - household rubbish, commercial and industrial detritus and construction rubble - is dumped here, squashed, and buried by yet more garbage.
From a distance, the scene looks like a surrealist ballet: a chain of lorries tips its grubby contents into the hole, then in sweeps a fleet of monstrous trucks with two-metre, steel-spiked wheels which crush and push the rubbish to make way for more on top. Depending on the wind, the stench can drift for miles. It smells worst in the morning, when human waste is added to the already potent mixture.
If there's anything of value buried in the rotten, relentless loads, the truck driver will first pull up in a truck park that sits before the landfill, a couple of kilometres down Wan Po Road. Behind this oil-stained car park is a collection of butchered shipping containers surrounded by what at first sight seems to be piles of junk. In fact, it's a small village, and the working home of a gaggle of about 60 men who make their living by sifting through this mountain of junk before it is thrown into the pit, pulling out anything that might turn a dollar.
Be it copper stripped from inside clapped-out vending machines, aluminium from window frames, steel pipes, old fridges, air conditioners or computers that might have something inside that's salvageable, a truck's contents will be spilled out, and labourers from one of 11 companies will begin rummaging.
The men working here call the junk they collect and sell 'curry'. Why? It's what it has always been called, they say. One suggests it is because the stuff they take off the trucks is such a mixture. Another says it originates from when they used to call the cash they gave the drivers 'tea money'. As trade picked up it became enough money for a curry. Some have elaborate, sexually crude and implausible explanations.
