Oh man if you had any idea how much work goes into waste sorting & disposal there. In McMurdo every trash station has trash cans for ~10 different categories. I was always calling up the waste department to ask about classification. We would get bored and argue about the classification of juice boxes for "fun". I worked on Erebus and all of our pee & poop got helicoptered out in buckets. Food waste was shipped all the way back to CA and had to be kept frozen the whole way.
I bet that helicopter pilot was some ex-Navy F-14 pilot who liked to buzz the tower and risked his taxpayer-owned jet to save his wingman after an encounter with MiG 28s.
I remember going to a talk on Antarctica where someone said that other nationalities would go and salvage stuff from the trash heap outside the US base at McMurdo. This was some years ago. I assume things have improved since then?
