Recycling in Singapore

“Why”, I wondered out loud to students after class one Friday, “Given all of the Westernish things and processes I see all around Singapore, like high end shopping malls, air conditioning everywhere, an incredible public transportation system…and the city is so clean…why don’t I see blue boxes everywhere, why not much evidence of recycling?”

“Ma’am, maybe that’s because you don’t know where to look.”

Truer words…

Karung guni is the local term for the occupational category “recycler.” But its roots are not so much a reflection of the modern sensibilities of environmental friendliness and avid recycling, as the time-honored tradition of wasting nothing...absolutely nothing.

My story about recycling starts, oddly enough, with bicycle horns. Almost everyone knows my quirky and VERY strong aversion to repetitive noise, accompanied by my inability to concentrate on anything else whenever it occurs. Noise doesn't bother me, even lots of it, even if it is loud and constant--as long as it is not rhythmic. Rhythmic repetitive noise that I find appealing (music) is distracting or absorbing, depending on what else I have going on—because I am transported by music, I can’t listen to music and work simultaneously.

Volume doesn't matter much. It's rhythm. So the up and down cadence of conversation doesn't count. Laughter and chit chat don't either. TV noise to me is like white noise for other people, I can tune it out entirely, no matter how much or how loud (as long as it's not a musical peformance). But the drumming of fingers, tapping of pencils, ringing of bells...those patterned repetitive sequences of noise are different. Repetitive noise in Debiworld (a strange place, for sure) is what I call the same sound repeated over and over and over...with a rhythm that I notice. All kinds of rhythm preoccupy, overwhelming my consciousness so that I can’t really focus on anything but the repeated sound.

I have two strategies for dealing with repetitive noise. When I can, I remove myself from its source. Alternatively, I stop it at its source. Otherwise, I get anxious first, and then cranky. I trace my aversion to repetitive noise to the summer my sister Nancy repeated everything I said everything I said everything I said everything I said. So, maybe it is no surprise that non-musical repetitive noise makes me just the tiniest bit crazy and abundantly hostile to its source. The same way I felt about Nancy that summer I thought would never end.

The first time I heard the repeated bleats of a bicycle horn in the parking lot outside my building here, I obviously noticed, but didn’t investigate. Just kids playing on bikes I figured (that was before I realized that I seldom ever saw kids on bikes—too hot to zip around on bikes for fun). The noise would move away as the kids rode off. Right. It stopped, no biggie.

The next time the horn started bleating, I felt a bit cranky. A second interruption. Why were they back? Don’t these kids have homework to do or someplace else to go? Don’t they know it is rude to disturb neighbors? Someone might be trying to work. Perhaps a bit overly focused on moi, but the amount and duration of noise did make it seem very inconsiderate. Couldn't they just holler insults and dirty words at each other like regular little boys (I was sure they were little boys)? I can handle that! It was the damn horn, over and over again. Grrrr. I gritted my teeth. But by the time I got to the window to see what was going on, the kids and the horn had disappeared, so the distraction was short lived and tolerable.

But the third time in a couple of hours that the horn interrupted my train of thought, I WAS really annoyed. I felt sure the offenders were probably members of an unruly gang of eight-year-old boys obliviously tooting the horn repeatedly, while I was trying to write. Or maybe it is just one kid who can't keep his hands off his horn. Regardless, enough was enough. Time to resolve the repetitive noise problem; strategies swirl in my head.

I know. If parents won’t stop the kid on the bike with a horn, maybe I can. I’ll just step outside and glare at the culprit(s). All of them will see the icy gaze of the (just slightly) crazy ang moh who is trying to work, and understand that means the noise should stop. Now. The glare will strike fear and respect in tiny hearts. They will freeze (figuratively, this is Singapore) in their tracks and decide the best strategies are either to just quit with the noise or take their horn(s) and their damn little bicycles elsewhere. I could stop this noise pollution in a hurry with one weedy look, I figured, no challenge for me.

I headed for the door, steeling myself to deliver the glare as convincingly as I could. So imagine my surprise when I saw that single, older, weather-beaten man pacing through the parking lot, squeezing the rubber ball of his hand-held horn as if his life depended on it. He was karung guni, though I didn’t know it then. To me, he was just a guy who made so much distracting noise that I wanted him gone. With no baskets, boxes or bags, he wasn't trying to sell anything, I reasoned. He just had a noisy horn. My neighbors did not seem enraged at the din (at least, I didn’t see anyone else outside of their flats glaring balefully like me). He must be an accepted figure, even if his exact role was a mystery. Maybe he was mentally retarded or ill or otherwise unusual (given his obsession with the horn), but nonetheless graciously tolerated by my neighbors (now I was feeling just a tad ashamed at my impatience). Or maybe his presence had purpose, just not one I could discern. Hmmmm. A man wandering around parking lots, relentlessly squeezing a horn, hollering every so often. I've encountered men like that before (sans horn) and they sometimes make me nervous. No obvious social interactions, people mostly just ignored him (although somewhat less studiously than they ignored me). He seemed to be part of Boundary Ville's landscape. I tried to settle back into cultural sensitivity mode. Especially since the imagined repetitive noise problem involving a pack of bratty little boys was not the REAL problem, I lacked a strategy for dealing with it. I wasn't about to try to confiscate the horn; an attempted stare down didn't seem like the smartest move either. My best bet was a hasty retreat back into the flat and fervent hope that this was just a one day nuisance.

Hah. Karung guni patrol HDB estates like mine every day. I don’t know if each has designated territory, or whether any place is fair game. I’ve seen a pretty regular cast of characters here. One guy has an open blue truck, another has an enclosed white panel truck, and a third fellow comes by bicycle (but still carries the offending horn in his hand!) with a big box mounted on the back. They park and walk up and down the parking lots outside the buildings, sounding their horns continuously as they hope to be beckoned flats above. Occasionally, they shout something (Mandarin or Malay, possibly in response to a face in a window) designating what particular type of stuff they're looking for (furniture, paper, electronics).

Karung guni provide door-to-door removal services, taking other people’s unwanted items (from bundled newspapers, to old furniture, electronic items [highly prized], plastic bags, worn out clothes, just about anything except wet household waste) and recycling that into other commercially useful stuff. They are the 21st century equivalent to Dickensian “rag and bones” men who patrolled the streets and lanes of historic England with their carts (most other countries too, I'm sure, but this is a nod to British colonialism here) collecting unwanted debris and giving it a useful second life. With not an iota of usefulness left in original states, rags and bones could be rendered down into paper and glue...the historical form of recycling before environmentalism became fashionable and recycling reached the status of a tangible symbol of one's green bona fides.

In Singapore, the useful second life which provides the karung guni’s living (and some are rumored to become quite wealthy) unfolds in a surprisingly 21st century way, given the more typical low tech direct approach to soliciting materials that I’ve observed. Usually, apartment owners holler down that they have stuff they want to give (or sometimes, sell)to the karung guni. But when someone moves flats, a karung guni can be summonsed, not from the parking lot, but from a website!

They trundle hand trucks up the stairs and elevators of high-rise buildings and haul (almost invariably) heavy stuff away. Sometimes karung guni buy unwanted items, but more often they provide convenient disposal of stuff with just enough eventual value to make hauling it downstairs worthwhile. Recycling by karung guni could involve selling hundreds of used plastic bags to a merchant at a flea market for pennies, auctioning something on eBay for thousands, stripping down electronics for component parts, or selling a bundle of newspapers to the paper industry.

They appear regularly, but not like clockwork. A single day may bring several visits by one guy, visits by several different guys, or maybe just one visit by a single karung guni. The predictable patterns are accompanying noise, their absence amidst the monsoon, and magical reappearance the second the rain stops. There is a supply/demand cycle, I'm sure, that I'll see once I watch over a longer period. For instance, the end of Ramadan was a peak in demand, with a veritible blitzkrieg of karung guni descending on Boundary Ville, as Muslim neighbors did annual housecleaning and replaced worn out items with new goods. It was karung guni field day, convened by a symphony of horns. The eventual cargo was an improbably amalgam of stuff, often in states so old and in such disrepair that imagining possible future value draws a blank--but the karung guni know their market, for sure.

I’ve since often watched as the karung guni load the motley assortment of booty coaxed from my HDB neighbors with their siren song of horns. They then head off to other parking lots in another housing estate, drawn magnetically towards the unknown potential of someone else’s recyclables. There they will repeat their ritual of bleating horns, faces hopefully upturned and the hard work of humping loads of other people's detrius up and down stairs and onto waiting trucks. Karung guni are one reason that Singapore is so clean

They are also the reason, as my students explained that Friday afternoon, that I failed to grasp the extent of local recycling. I expected to see some variant of high profile blue plastic recycle boxes that are ubiquitous in the U.S. and U.K. Singapore's recycling culture, of course, was there all along, I just didn’t know where to look...or how to listen. What I finally discoverd in lieu of seeing the expected blue boxes was hearing the much more exotic karung guni horns, now subsided into just another of the interestingly different parts of my everyday life in Singapore.

I hardly even notice the repetitive noise any more.