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Dishevelled in their rags, abuzz with flies and stinking of rotting
rubbish, Cairo’s rubbish collectors, the Zabbaleen, have never found it
easy to find friends. Over the past 10 years, however, they have become
adept at a trade which has brought both money and international interest
to their settlements. Cairo’s Zabbaleen recycle about 30 per cent of the
city’s household waste – 80 per cent of the total that they collect. Currently
Britain recycles just 2 to 3 per cent of its household rubbish. Recovering
as much as 30 per cent is still only an aim, albeit one that is considered
realistic (see ‘Recycling Britain’ and ‘Waste that no one wants’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
8 September 1990).

Like rubbish collectors all over the Third World, the Zabbaleen are
on the bottom rung of the social ladder. They form part of Egypt’s largest
religious minority, the Coptic Christians. Based in seven squatter settlements
on the outskirts of the city, they have repeatedly been moved on to make
way for more ‘respectable’ citizens. Driving donkey carts and overladen
pick-up trucks, they have always been an embarrassment to a district administration,
the governorate, striving to put forward a Western image.

Now, however, the governorate realises that it has a severe waste problem.
Cairo’s population of 14 million, which is rapidly rising, produces about
10 000 tonnes of rubbish every day. Household waste varies from district
to district. In the richer suburbs, where people shop at modern supermarkets,
dustbins contain large amounts of the packaging that pervades the West.
In the poorer areas, people throw away little more than mouldy vegetables.

About 60 per cent of Cairo’s rubbish is collected. Of this, the Zabbaleen
take two-thirds, mainly from the poorer districts, and ‘official’ refuse
collectors pick up one-third. The rest lies around in the city’s streets
where it is trodden into the dirt, providing a breeding ground for diseases
such as typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis and tetanus.

The governorate has tried to improve the situation by encouraging new,
Western-style rubbish collecting companies to compete with the Zabbaleen,
who have been Cairo’s main refuse collectors since the early 19th century.
One of these companies, a local security firm called Care Services Limited,
has substantial financial and political backing. Anxious to live up to the
businesslike image that the governorate had in mind, the company bought
compressor trucks from Europe and boiler suits for its employees. Surprisingly,
this has not put the Zabbaleen out of business.

Collecting the rubbish is not the problem for the new companies. Their
compressor trucks are much more efficient than the Zabbaleen pick-up trucks
– especially in the wide roads in the centre of Cairo. Disposal, however,
is more difficult and it is here that the Zabbaleen have stolen a march
on their rivals. In the West, many recognise the attraction of recycling
but are discouraged by the cost. In Egypt, however, much of the population
is poor and forced to make do with imperfect and second-hand goods. This,
allied to the low standards of health and safety, means that there is a
good potential market for whatever the Zabbaleen can recycle.

While Cairo has expanded fourfold in the past 20 years, facilities for
disposing of the city’s waste have fallen hopelessly behind. Cairo’s single
composting heap has a capacity of only 600 tonnes per day. Landfills are
situated at least 10 kilometres outside the city limits, making their operation
barely cost-effective. Confronted by these problems, many refuse collectors
are secretly selling their loads to the Zabbaleen for between E £5
(84p) and E £10 per tonne, instead of driving to the landfills.

The largest Zabbaleen settlement is Manshiet Nasser, a community of
17 000 people, situated in a rocky valley at the southeastern edge of Cairo.
Here the Zabbaleen own the land, and because of the attention of a large
number of aid agencies (including Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, the World
Bank and the Ford Foundation) they are better off than at other settlements,
and their recycling industries are more advanced.

For a Westerner visiting the community, the first reaction is one of
horror that anybody should have to undertake such degrading work. Families
sort through rubbish in and around their own homes, dividing it into plastics,
metals, rags, paper, bones and organic matter. Wild dogs, goats and pigs
nose through the garbage as children play alongside. The stench and the
flies are overpowering, and the dangers of disease, fire and injury are
always present. In 1976 a large part of the settlement was burnt to the
ground.

However, from the mess emerge orderly stacks. There are smaller piles
of less valuable items, such as carbon from old dry batteries and filaments
from light bulbs. Piles of driving licences, passports and government papers,
accidentally thrown away, lie waiting to be claimed. Most Zabbaleen find
it too time-consuming to recycle tin cans but some still undertake the task:
first the bottoms and tops need to be cut off and the cylinder squashed
flat, then all the parts are placed with sawdust in a large rotating drum
to clean them. The pieces can then be sent to workshops to be reworked into
cans for non-foodstuffs. Orange peel lies around unprocessed; it is unpopular
with the pigs.

At Manshiet Nasser, different families specialise in different materials.
Out of 30 houses that I visited this year, 10 specialised in plastics, 6
in paper, 6 in rags, 3 in metals, 2 in glass, 2 in bones and 1 in tin cans.
Nearly all the families kept pigs. Most of the glass, paper, bone and metal
is sent in trucks back to the city to be reprocessed, although some is recycled
at the settlement. Cairo has an infrastructure that supports the reprocessing
of waste. One area of the city, Septayya, is given over solely to reprocessing
metals. Another, Bulaq, is a centre for second-hand clothes and old car
parts. Imbaba has a huge junk market where Cairenes can pick up household
and electrical goods at bargain prices.

Much of the metal at Manshiet Nasser goes to Septayya. Light bulb filaments
and some other metals are returned to the factories where they were originally
manufactured. The glass goes to small workshops where it is reblown into
bowls, jugs and glasses. Paper waste is sent back to paper mills: Egypt
has few trees and must rely either on paper imports or on paper recycling.
Bones end up in factories to be turned into glue, soap, animal feed or filters
for the purification of honey or oil. In addition, the Zabbaleen sell their
pigs to a government slaughterhouse and take the manure to a fertiliser
factory close to the settlement.

Beer bottles are also recycled. Two types of local beer are sold in
Cairo – Stella Local and Stella Export. Stella Local is the most popular
and its bottles are returnable. The Zabbaleen collect and auction the nonreturnable
Stella Export bottles, most of which are bought by the state-owned Egyptian
Chemical Company, which uses them to bottle acid. There is also a thriving
market in Western spirit bottles, such as Johnnie Walker, Gordon’s Gin and
Chivas Regal, which fetch about 50 piastres (9p) each. They are sold to
a handful of local companies which use them to bottle their own spirits.
The companies then use similar labels and give their products names such
as Johnnie Darkie, Dordon’s Dry Din and Chivas Renal, in imitation of the
original products.

Increasingly, the Zabbaleen are reprocessing materials themselves. In
one workshop I visited at the settlement, they melt down a variety of metals
and pour them into clay moulds to make door handles and wall brackets. The
products I saw seemed particularly brittle. Unsaleable clothes are either
torn into thin strips and woven on hand looms into rag rugs, or shredded
into fluff. The Zabbaleen use large machines, rather like primitive threshing
machines, to produce fluff which is used to stuff car seats and mattresses.

Plastics are sorted by appearance and ground into pellets in a machine
similar to a Banbury mixer (see ‘Plastics: waste not, want not’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
1 December 1990). There are also some injection-moulding machines at the
settlement which produce photograph frames, bicycle decorations and imitation
flowers. But most of the pelletised plastic is sold – at about half the
price of newly manufactured polymers – to factories which produce cheap
plastic goods. Around 500 factories in Cairo use recycled plastics.

Some of the products have become fashionable among high society in Cairo.
Most middle-class Egyptian homes now have brightly coloured rag rugs. Recycled
glassware, attractive because of its imperfect shape and colour, is popular
in Cairo’s Khan El Khalili bazaar, where tourists will pay E £3 for
a glass. Now recycled jugs are exported; in London’s fashionable department
stores, for example, they sell for £7.95. In Cairo the same jugs
sell for E £7.

The prices commanded by sorted waste make recycling worthwhile for the
Zabba-leen. Paper sells for between E £150 and E £200 per tonne;
the price could increase if a plan to export it to Kuwait goes ahead. Glass,
depending on quality, sells from E £40 per tonne and dry bones for
about E £150 per tonne. The real money earner, however, is plastics,
which sell for between E £750 and E £1200 per tonne. A tonne
of plastic bottles takes about two months for an individual to collect,
while the wage of an average government employee is under E £100 per
month.

Everywhere at Manshiet Nasser there are piles of old shopping baskets
and bottles that were used to hold motor oil or washing-up liquid. Even
types of plastic that had initially seemed too light to bother with, such
as supermarket bags and yoghurt cartons, are now being collected. Mounir
Bushra, an engineer working for Environmental Quality International, a local
environmental consultancy group recalls: ‘Once one of the biggest foodstuff-producing
companies (Juhayna), asked EQI to do something with its (plastic) residues.
I went to one of the garbage collectors and asked him to make use of this
plastic but he refused, saying it was too light.’ However, the increase
in the price of plastics over the past year has changed attitudes: ‘Now
he collects it and it fetches between E £800 and E £1000 per
tonne. He also recycles plastic film, selling the product for up to E £1200
per tonne’, says Bushra.

Over the past five years, Manshiet Nasser has undergone something of
an industrial revolution. In many of the houses, the squealing of pigs competes
with the din of electric motors. Where there were once shacks thrown together
with corrugated iron and chipped rock, there are now three-or four-storey
brick houses. Several Zabbaleen own televisions, cassette recorders or refrigerators,
and when the use of donkey carts in Cairo was banned at the beginning of
1990, some went out and bought Toyota pick-up trucks, which cost E £28
000 new and E £8000 second-hand.

Sometimes the Zabbaleen club together to buy trucks. Over the past six
months more than 10 new Zabbaleen companies have been set up. A few of the
Zabbaleen are spending up to E £8000 on machines for grinding and
moulding plastics and for shredding rags. The machines, based on Western
designs, are made in small workshops in the city. Several of their owners
have become sufficiently rich to sit in the background, drinking tea and
smoking, while others slave away for them in the heat.

Mixed futures

However, the Zabbaleen still face problems. The biggest obstacle to
the further development of their recycling industry is the layout of the
settlement, which is on several levels, making the installation of services
and access for heavy vehicles almost impossible. The houses are illegal,
built without planning permission. Apart from a large pipe installed by
the World Bank, there is no drainage. Drinking water and electricity are
at best sporadic.

One answer would be to move the settlement. However, the Zabbaleen would
resist this as they have designed their settlement to suit their needs.
Their houses are built on stilts above large enclosed spaces where they
can sort rubbish. Pigsties in the waste ground between the houses are carefully
laid out in a jigsaw pattern, made intricate by complex inheritance rules.
Finally, having paid for their buildings, the Zabbaleen are reluctant to
move.

Zabbaleen families compete with each other, making cooperation on moving
to a new site hard to envisage. A family which has been collecting from
a lucrative area, like one of the five-star hotels, the airport or the underground,
would be unwilling to share its loads with another which has been collecting
from a district that produces little more than rotten tomatoes and cabbage
cuttings. In addition, the wealth being generated by the recycling is becoming
increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, some 5 per
cent of the community. It is hard to gauge the standard of living of the
other Zabbaleen; their surround-ings give the impression that they are poor,
but this may not always be the case.

The future for the settlement is unclear. Aid agencies are reluctant
to invest in an area that displays some obvious signs of wealth, and they
have melted away as solidly built apartment blocks have appeared on the
skyline of Manshiet Nasser. The Egyptian government, too, is reluctant to
help the Zabbaleen, as they do not register their work or pay taxes. But
prospects for those involved in recycling seem rosy. Bushra expects that
the Zabbaleens’ machines will be steadily improved and that the area will
become increasingly indus-trialised. ‘Garbage collection is like any other
trade,’ he says. ‘As long as there is a good market for recycled goods,
people will not want to leave it.’ Money talks – even from the bottom of
a steaming, stinking pile of rubbish.

Jasper Bouverie has been writing and editing for the magazine Cairo
Today for the past three years.