Seoul (CNN)Uiseong, a picturesque South Korean farming county, was a backwater until homegrown heroes the Garlic Girls became breakout stars and curling silver medalists at last year’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
In recent months the spotlight has again fallen on Uiseong for a far less glorious reason: a smoldering mountain of garbage which highlights the trash crisis in the densely populated nation.
Among the rice paddies and beside the Nakdong River in the country’s east, a horseshoe-shaped, 170,000-ton heap of trash is spontaneously combusting, spewing out plumes of smoke and the nose-scorching, chemical stench of burning plastic.
