Christian trash collectors in Cairo achieve 85% recycle rate - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

cmac2012 · #1 06-05-2006, 02:09 PM

Even though these guys manage to recycle more of their trash than almost any other municipality in the world, the gub-mint wants to upgrade to more modern methods and the city's Muslim majority look down their noses at the Coptic Christian minority who do the dirty work.

From Cairo's trash, a model of recycling
Old door-to-door method boasts 85% reuse rate
Jack Epstein, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, June 3, 2006

Cairo -- At a school unlike any in the Middle East, 15-year-old Magdi Shenuda learns how to use a computer to track the number of plastic bottles he recycled in the past month.

The Recycling School, in a Cairo district noted chiefly for its garbage dump, teaches about 100 poor children their ABCs, fundamental health and the arts -- and basic training in the collection and reuse of trash.

Magdi lives in Manshiet Nasser, one of seven Cairo neighborhoods populated primarily by Coptic Christians who toil as zabaleen -- Arabic for garbage collectors. For more than five decades, city residents have relied on their cheap -- less than $1 a month -- door-to-door service, which hauls away trash by small truck or donkey cart. The zabaleen spend hours sorting glass, plastic, cardboard, paper, tin and torn clothes in their communities and sell it to local factories that wash, compress and resell the materials.

Many residents of this poverty-stricken settlement of 40,000 in an abandoned quarry at the foot of the Muqattam Hills are descendants of poor farmers who came to Cairo in the 1950s. They turned to garbage collection because the majority Muslim population -- only 10 percent of Egypt's 70 million people are Coptic Christians -- considers such work unclean.

"Muslims would never do that kind of work," Ali Hussein Yousef, a Cairo limousine driver and a Muslim, said dismissively.

The Egyptian government regards the trash collectors as a shameful remnant of the past and wants to put them out of business.

For three years, municipal authorities have tried to replace Cairo's estimated 70,000 zabaleen primarily with sanitation companies from Spain and Italy, which provide their employees with colorful uniforms to wear as they pick up trash placed on sidewalks in shiny, brand-name trash cans. Mechanized trucks crush the garbage and take it to newly created desert landfills.

"Egypt is promoting Cairo as a modern city with modern garbage collectors to fit the image," said Emil Nashat Atef Baset, director of the Garbage Collectors Association for Community Development, a nonprofit organization that represents zabaleen workers. "They are embarrassed by the zabaleen."

But many Cairo residents still prefer the door-to-door service and have sued the foreign companies over extra fees for garbage collection added to their electricity bills. Last year, a Cairo court nullified the fees, calling them unconstitutional.

Moreover, the foreign companies collect only about a third of the estimated 13,000 tons of garbage left daily by Cairo's 17 million residents, according to a study by Nicholas Hopkins, a professor of anthropology at the American University in Cairo.

"The government doesn't have a system of disposing trash and solid waste," said Hopkins, "So people depend on the zabaleen."

Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif conceded that the European companies had failed so far to win the hearts and trash of many Cairo residents. "They haven't done a good job," he said. "We are in a race to keep up with the pace of population growth, but you can't run a country into the modern age overnight."

The zabaleen collect about one-third of Cairo's trash -- 4,500 tons a day -- while the remainder is dumped anywhere and everywhere. All across the city, dogs and goats sift through trash piled high along walls, street corners and narrow streets. These mounds eventually are burned by municipal workers, adding to the already heavy pollution in the air.

In Kafr al Elow, a Muslim community of 5,000 residents 30 miles south of Cairo, the anarchy of trash is readily apparent.

"Every day we sweep it up, and every day people empty their garbage back on the streets," said Reda Anwar, a 17-year-old trash collector clad in the colorful green-and-orange uniform of Europa 2000, a private Egyptian sanitation company that has a contract with the government.

Despite the filth, the health risks -- many zabaleen suffer from hepatitis -- and low-tech methods, the zabaleen recycle 85 percent of the trash they collect, while the foreign companies are required to recycle only 20 percent, Hopkins says.

That high recovery rate has attracted admirers. Later this summer, four students from the Recycling School are scheduled to travel to Lebanon to teach recycling skills to children in Beirut. And the overpopulated cities of Manila and Bombay have copied the zabaleen's homespun system.

"They have created what is arguably one of the world's most efficient resource-recovery and waste-recycling systems," Wael Salah Fahmi, professor of architecture and urban design at Helwan University in Cairo, wrote in a 2005 study.

Agaibe Labib started as a garbage collector when he was 10 years old.

As he has done on most days for the past 25 years, Labib leaves his home in Manshiet Nasser and heads downtown to solicit garbage door-to-door from his regular customers. When he returns each afternoon, his entire family -- his wife and four of their five children, ages 3 to 11 -- helps sort the day's haul for an average monthly income of roughly $75.

Like most zabaleen, Labib earns the bulk of his money from selling bags filled with recycled items to small factories in the neighborhood that prepare it for reuse and, in some cases, manufacture tourist souvenirs, shoe heels, coat hangers, bags and mats. Organic waste is fed to pigs, whose meat they sell to specialty stores, restaurants and hotels that cater to Westerners.

"It's our livelihood. There is nothing else that we can do to survive," said Labib.

It's a hard existence.

Inside dank rooms, in front of homes of reinforced concrete and along brick walls, pigs, goats and dogs eat rotting produce, while women and children cast aside dead rodents as they busily separate trash from recyclable items. Bags filled with glass, plastic, tin, paper and cardboard are piled high along the main avenue and side streets. Hordes of flies hover over the pungent heaps of trash yet to be sorted. Many walls are decorated with large crosses and pictures of Jesus.

Labib was one of the few zabaleen willing to talk to a reporter in a community where there is much mistrust of outsiders. Even though the zabaleen offer a badly needed service, they are scorned by many Muslims for raising pigs, a source of food forbidden by the Quran.

When a reporter snapped a photo of a woman sorting trash in front of her home, she quickly covered her face while her husband threw a large piece of cardboard at the reporter, screaming for him to leave immediately.

Meanwhile, Labib does not appear worried about the government's long-standing threat to end his way of life by moving zabaleen communities to settlements in the eastern desert.

"People need us," he said.

TheDon · #2 06-05-2006, 02:58 PM

note to self.. do not eat bacon in cairo

cmac2012 · #3 06-06-2006, 11:51 PM

HAH! Did you catch the part about hepatitis being a problem with the trash sorters?

It sounds crude but round here, places to dump trash are becoming scarcer scarcer. Something like that with better safety equip might become common.

cmac2012 · #4 06-07-2006, 01:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheDon

note to self.. do not eat bacon in cairo

I'd m issed the part about selling organic waste to pigs. A bit dicey I guess, though I hear pigs have been eating some pretty nasty stuff for a long time.

Botnst · #5 06-07-2006, 01:56 PM

Well of course. I mean look at the Christian parsimony toward souls: Waste not want not.

B

cmac2012 · #6 06-07-2006, 01:59 PM

It is a bit odd to focus on the Christian/Moslem angle. As if we needed another reason to dislike Moslems -- they're too damn proud to deal with their own trash.

I imagine the Chrisitians there would avoid it if they had better options.

I hear that we throw away enough aluminum every year to rebuild the entire U.S. air fleet four times over. That's a lot of wealth being casually discarded.

kitchenrat · #7 06-07-2006, 05:35 PM

considering that every indigenous culture on this planet has had a christian foot on its neck for centuries, i found this article refreshingly ironic.