Smokey Mountain at Steung Mean Chey, is Phnom Penh's municipal rubbish dump. Many thousands work here, recycling the city's rubbish, dumped by garbage trucks every day and night. Several hundred workers are minors and some are very young children, who often work with friends or relatives for protection. The overpowering, acrid odour of grey smokey fumes blowing across the dump, gives this place gets its name. Smokey Mountain is notorious for disease, pollution and crime. It is an open air work and living zone. People do almost everything here; they buy food, eat, sleep, amidst the rubbish and fumes. They work 24 hours a day, with headlamps at night, which they have to rent for a quarter of their average gains. They collect plastic bags, hard plastic, metals, wood, cloth & paper, which then needs to be sorted and cleaned, weighed and sold, then carried away for recycling. A day's work typically brings less than a dollar per person, less $.25cents lamp rental. They just manage to survive, to work another day.
