Cairo, Egypt

Cairo is the largest city in Egypt, with roots in settlements more than two millennia old. Its waste management challenges in the 21st century reveal longstanding social and economic tensions. The core of Cairo's solid waste management system is exemplary with its recycling rate of about 85 percent. Based on garbage collectors (called zabaleen), their families, and communities, this labor-intensive core is among the most sustainable systems in the world. The zabaleen have come under attack, however, by neoliberal privatization and gentrification. Metropolitan Cairo (including parts of Giza and Qaloubiya governorates) has about 17 million inhabitants. Authorities are overwhelmed with keeping up with urban services. Modern amenities abound in wealthier quarters; poor residents lack many such conveniences.

Colonial municipalities did not spend much time on waste. In the early 20th century, migrants from desert oases (called wahiya) started to collect waste from wealthier households. They sold waste as fuel to public bathhouses or makers of fuul, a bean dish. In the 1940s, as garbage increased, poor Christian migrants became subcontractors of the Muslim wahiya. These migrants, the zabaleen, bought organic waste (the largest part of the refuse) for their pigs, which the Muslim wahiya were prohibited by Islam to keep. Brokers (called mu'allim) set up new arrivals with pigs, shacks, and pigsties. Humans and pigs shared one yard. Wahiya oversaw the garbage business, and zabaleen worked the garbage routes. In the 1950s and 1960s, mu'allims set up zabaleen set-tlements on the urban fringes. With urban expansion, zabaleen were relocated to more distant locations.

As garbage proliferated, the zabaleen refined waste processing. Glass, metal, bones, or rags were sorted and sold to middlemen who resold them to workshops. Garbage was—and remains—a family business. Husbands left settlements in the early morning with donkey carts. Children traveled with them to guard carts, while fathers went into buildings to collect garbage. Upon returning home, men dumped the carts of waste into family yards, where women and children sorted the garbage and pigs and goats consumed organic waste. The wahiyazabaleen system resembles those of 19th-century Western cities, where urban waste fed into rural-to-urban [Page 88]waste and agricultural circuits, except theirs is an urban-to-urban fringe circuit and has a higher recycling rate (New York's Barren Island recycled 60 percent in the 19th century).

In 1970, authorities relocated a zabaleen community to the Moqattam Mountain east of Cairo. The community received no municipal services. Regardless, the zabaleen worked and improved recycling. Driven by poverty and maintained by both family labor and an understanding of the value of resources, the system provided work for thousands. Leftover garbage was dumped on the street or dumping grounds outside the community and burned. Their smoldering clouded the community in pollution.

This efficient system had flaws. Because zabaleen sought valuable garbage, they did not service poor neighborhoods. However, no municipal waste management existed through the 1970s, and poor people simply threw their garbage on neighborhood dumps, which were regularly burned. The system's worst flaw was its human cost; in the 1970s, infant mortality among the zabaleen was 40 percent, as diseases were pervasive. The Moqattam community started organizing, and the first Garbage Collectors’ Association was registered in the 1970s with the Ministry of Social Affairs.

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