Out With the Trash? - Cairo's Legendary 'Garbage People' Threatened
Pacific News Service, News Feature, Gretel C. Kovach, Posted: Feb 17, 2003
Though they live in a Dickensian landscape of towering trash heaps and smoking fires, Cairo's zabbaleen have advanced economically from collecting and recycling the sprawling city's garbage. Now, as the city privatizes trash collection, a way of life could disappear.
CAIRO, Egypt--In the rocky hills above Cairo, a poor community of Coptic Christians has learned to turn trash into treasure. The zabbaleen -- or "garbage people" -- cart away about a third of the city's refuse at no cost to the government. Back home in Moqattam, the whole family pitches in to hand-sort, recycle and resell about 80 percent of it, using the proceeds to build brick houses, clinics, and schools where there once were none.
Garbage City, as Moqattam is sometimes called, is an award-winning model of community development and eco-friendly ingenuity. Its methods have been imitated in Manila, Bombay and even Los Angeles. But now the zabbaleen are afraid that they are the ones being put on the trash heap. Starting this month, the zabbaleen begin losing their licenses when European waste management companies take over Cairo's trash collection routes.
Privatizing public services is an international trend, but in Cairo, what some consider modernization means scrapping an innovative source of income for the city's most disadvantaged social group. "It's a catastrophe. Overnight, 50,000 people could be out of a job," says Berti Shaker, who manages literacy programs for zabbaleen children.
The city sold $50 million in annual contracts to three private companies, hoping to bring order to the hodgepodge system now in place to dispose of 10,000 pounds of trash produced by 16 million Cairo residents each day. In addition to the zabbaleen, city workers also collect rubbish, and in some areas no one does -- it piles up in the streets, and the air becomes thick from trash fires.
"This is a global problem -- how to integrate community-based waste management with the multinationals," says Leila Iskandar, a zabbaleen advocate for more than two decades. "These contracts are costing the city big, big money. Why not spend just 10 percent of that to upgrade the zabbaleen system?"
Last September, she and other zabbaleen friends sounded the alarm at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and since then city officials have taken notice. The Cairo governor announced a few weeks ago that zabbaleen can bid on the contract for the southern sector of the city, and he is encouraging the foreign companies to hire them as trash collectors.
Even if the zabbaleen find jobs with the new companies, their recycling projects and the social programs they fund could end. The contractors are only required to recycle 20 percent of the trash, and the rest will go into a new landfill. To the zabbaleen, that's like burying money.
But the practice of sorting garbage at home has to end, says General Mohamed Il Leben, chairman of the Cairo Cleaning and Beautification Authority (CCBA). "There should be some organization to collect and get rid of this trash safely. The zabbaleen system is dangerous to public health."
At first glance, the human costs of maintaining the zabbaleen way of life appear to outweigh the economic and environmental benefits. A tour through Moqattam reveals a Dickensian landscape where barefoot children squat in the trash with their families, picking through orange peels and rusted cans. Laundry hangs out to dry above three-story high piles of garbage, and the fetid stench of rotting trash is everywhere.
The zabbaleen suffer from abnormally high rates of emphysema and hepatitis, their hands and arms are sometimes shredded along with plastic in the large granulators, and mounds of trash can spontaneously burst into flames. Children rarely can afford the luxury of school.
Still, in a city with double-digit unemployment and the threat of another economic shock on the horizon due to possible war in Iraq, there are many reasons to save the zabbaleen. They became trash collectors in the first place because there were no other jobs for disadvantaged farmers. They needed slop for their pigs, and noticed that Muslims were loathe to collect trash because of the ritual purity needed for prayers. The Christian zabbaleen had fewer misgivings.
"It's a hard job and not just anybody can do it, not people with diplomas," says Haleem Rosdy, 28. "But I can."
Mosaad Adly, 50, traded his donkey cart in for a truck and eventually rose through the trade to become a foreman. He remembers what it was like when the zabbaleen first moved to Cairo 50 years ago from southern Egypt. "There was no electricity, no water, we lived in small little shacks, and when it rained we got wet. We made all of this by working," he says. "But if they shut us down, we're out of luck.
The Mega-Cities Project, an international urban planning nonprofit, praises the zabbaleen for cutting infant and child mortality in half, instituting almost universal immunization and eradicating tetanus as a major infant-killer. Although literacy rates remain low, at a UNESCO-funded Recycling School boys study reading, business math, arts and computers. Almost a dozen zabbaleen serve the community as doctors and lawyers.
"They've built so much with so little," Shaker says.
Kovach (gckovach@hotmail.com) is a freelance writer based in Cairo.
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