Life is a bitch and then you die...

After eight o´clock at night you leave your daily trash in a plastic bag in the street to be collected by the trash van cruising the streets at night. When I noticed the night shift workers (cartoneros) coming along with their trolleys to sort my paper from glass from plastic from ordinary food waste from the rest by hand, and before the vans get a chance to collect my garbage, I realized the porteños had a system for sorting waste. I thought with horror of all the crap I put in the waste bin, and I stopped throwing my newspapers in the same bag as the orange peel and dental floss and...
Coming to think of it, a goverment run system for sorting waste would probably leave hundreds of people without income as they sell their paper and plastic and metal and glass by the pound.
And coming to think of something else: Where are all the rats? With so much garbage in the streets, there must be millions of thick, well fed rats. But I havn´t seen one. Nor a cockroach...