Tangled Journeys on NPRnews.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/03/23/394827432/you-think-your-city-is-full-of-trash-ha
tangledjourneys
A personal perspective on human interest stories from an American journalist living abroad
Tangled Journeys on NPRnews.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/03/23/394827432/you-think-your-city-is-full-of-trash-ha
tangledjourneys 
Great photographic contrast – the idyllic, Shambala-like countryside and the garbage.
This story reminds me of the summer of ’86 which I and my then-wife spent living in downtown Philadelphia. Toward August, the sanitation workers’ union contract was up for renewal.
Naturally, they were looking for a big raise.
Naturally, City Hall didn’t want to give it to them.
So they went on strike.
After one week, the normally dominant fragrance of petrochemical exhaust was overtaken by the aroma of boiling garbage.
The Philadelphia Daily News – a publication known for its malevolent impishness – began a column written by a Count de Bris.
The Count purported to visit the many impromptu garbage dumps that Philadelphians had created throughout the city. He reviewed the dumps the way that a food columnist reviews restaurants. Only instead of indicating the merits of a site by using stars, the Count used silhouettes of rats.
The Count had much to write about since the strike lasted for a month.
The top score a dump could receive was four rats.
But the Count made an exception to this when a human body was found at a dump site in South Philadelphia and subsequently earned a rare five-rat rating.
The strike finally ended and the sanitation workers got everything they wanted.
Then they proceeded to clean up the city albeit in their own laconic pace, evidently attempting to make an ineradicable impression on the minds of Philadelphians so that the next time the contract was up for renewal people would write City Hall with the message “Since you’re gonna give them what they want, anyway, give it to them now and avoid the stink.”