Much ink has been spilled by the media about the Zabaleen, the most efficient recyclers in the world. Their work in Cairo is exemplary, helping that city to recycle three times more waste than, say, New York or any other Western city. The Zabaleen collect two-thirds of the total garbage thrown away by Greater Cairo’s 22 million residents, and recycle up to 80% of the city of Cairo.
The magic relies on door-to-door waste pickup. The Zabaleen (literally “garbage men” in Arabic) navigate Cairo’s labyrinth of alleys, busy roads and apartment complexes to collect household waste. They use pickup trucks to transport the garbage back home. There, they sort and separate plastic, glass, iron, steel, and aluminum, and then sell them by the kilo to intermediaries, such as small factories that squeeze and compact the materials into pallets. These pallets are then sold to either environmental NGOs or directly to local or international companies that produce recycled raw materials.
Zabaleen’s work is a tedious, mostly manual task, but it is effective in recycling most of Cairo’s plastic consumption. The Zabaleen take the garbage to their homes and prepare it for recycling themselves. As plastic keeps contaminating our oceans, and the impacts of climate change keep coming at us harder and faster than expected, Zabaleen’s work is a momentous undertaking that finds itself on the right side of history.
The Zabaleen have always been recyclers; and as such, were very much ahead of their time. They are the descendants of subsistence farmers, mostly Christians, who migrated from Upper Egypt to the outskirts of Cairo in the 1940s looking for better job opportunities in the big city. They started collecting other people’s household waste and using the organic waste to feed the pigs they kept in their backyards. They also used the refuse, after drying it, as a source of energy, specifically as fuel for public baths and bean cookeries.
As the amount of solid waste began to increase with new materials – plastic, glass, iron, tin, steel, aluminum – so did the Zabaleen. Currently Egypt produces 5.4 million metric tonnes of plastic annually, making it the second biggest plastic polluter in the Middle East after Turkey. The neighborhood of the Zabaleen, commonly known as “Garbage City,” located in the district of Manshiyat Naser, has been steadily growing. It has reached a population of 1.5 million and it is one of the 30 largest slums in the world.
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In the mid-’80s, the Ford Foundation was the first to notice the work of the Zabaleen. They were also the first ones to give away micro-credits amounting five thousand Egyptian pounds (nowadays US$103) to those Zabaleen who wanted to level up their recycling work with plastic crushers, paper balers, and cloth shredders. Then other nonprofit organizations followed suit – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Danish Embassy in Cairo, the Sawiris family (the richest Egyptian family), to name a few – and supported the work of the Zabaleen. The Zabaleen’ projects increased in number from five to one to one thousand projects (including all the small factories involved in recycling). “The NGOs have glittered the recycling activities and the life-quality of the people that work in that field,” explains Ezzat Naem Gendy.
Gendy is a long-time environmental and human rights activist, founder of the Zabaleen union in Manshiyat Naser and founder of The Spirit of Youth for Environmental Services for the Zabaleen (that got funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Currently he works for Plastic Bank, a social fintech project that uses an application to collect plastic within a global bottle deposit program for multinationals with the aim of helping end poverty and stop plastic pollution.
Born in Cairo, Gendy’s family moved from Upper Egypt to the big city seeking job opportunities in the early ‘50s. After moving from one place to the next in Cairo’s suburbs, they settled in Manshiyat Naser and found, in garbage collection and recycling, a feasible source of income. In his teen years, Gendy volunteered for some nonprofit organizations that aimed at improving the slum inhabitants’ quality of life. He was part of the health team that advised people to vaccinate their children.
Together with some of his friends, Gendy was able to raise funds to establish schools and educate many illiterate inhabitants, and he even helped in building the drainage system of the settlement. Gendy also became a mediator between the Zabaleen and nonprofit organizations to fund equipment and materials in the recycling process that elevated the labor conditions of the workers.
Amal Alfy, a 36-year-old woman born in Manshiyat Naser, has been working in recycling for years. Every early morning, her husband, a garbage collector, went out to the main districts of Cairo and brought back several sacks of waste for Alfy to sort through, removing the plastic (unfortunately he passed away as this article went to press). Alfy had already prepared breakfast and sent her children off to school. So she took the sacks up to the roof, where she separated the waste from 8am to 6pm. She uses all the safety equipment provided to her by nonprofit organizations, and she is registered to receive a monthly stipend granted through an application to another one. She also gets a health card that she and her family members can use to receive medical treatment. Indeed, “working with the nonprofit organizations has provided me with many societal benefits,” says Alfy, including even odds and ends “like the children’s school bags containing copybooks, pens, and other items.”
The involvement of NGOs has further facilitated the improvement of labor conditions, health services for the Zabaleen (as handling garbage leads to many diseases and infections) and the legalization of their small factories, explains Gendy, so that they can obtain tax cards and tax records. However, nearly fifty years after the first funding by the Ford Foundation, the city’s authorities only provide support and official status to small recycling factories and waste disposal companies when government capital and funds are available. So Zabaleen’s work remains largely informal.
In addition, the Zabaleen experienced setbacks on several occasions. In 2003, the market was liberalized for multinational corporations to handle waste disposal through contracts granted by the city. That not only put a great number of Zabaleen out of a job, it just didn’t work. Cairo residents couldn’t get used to taking down their garbage and so continued to pay the Zabaleen to come up and get their garbage unofficially. Some years later, after Mohamed Morsi was elected, he claimed to clean the streets of Cairo with newly appointed waste management companies. But the streets ended up worse than before, and the government had to bring back the Zabaleen.
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There is no doubt that Cairo needs the Zabaleen, but so does the rest of the country. In the countryside and in rural villages along the Nile River, waste ends up in landfills full of plastic. This plastic often blows away and ends up in the Nile that carries the waste to the Mediterranean Sea. Egypt ranks 7th in the world for being the biggest marine-plastic polluting country. “Outside the big cities, the concept of waste separation and recycling hasn’t arrived,” says Gendy. According to a research paper by the American University in Cairo, recycling activities in Egypt do not exceed 20% of the generated waste – an abysmal difference compared to Cairo.
In Cairo recycling has been making a significant impact on Egypt’s economy for nearly a century. This activity provides large quantities of recycled raw materials internally that Egypt would otherwise have to import. Abroad, multinationals rely on the importation of plastic bottles from Egypt, explains Gendy, to comply with a European law that requires 25% of produced plastic bottles to be made from recycled plastic. Under the European Commission’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive’s terms, at least 65% of all packaging waste must be made from recycled material by December 31, 2025, and at least 70% by December 31, 2030.
Furthermore, recycling has paved the way for new industries to emerge, like carpet and cutlery made of recycled material, that have generated jobs in many underprivileged Cairo neighborhoods. According to Gendy, job opportunities in this sector have been on the rise, and there is now close to zero unemployment in Manshiyat Naser, while the average income there has increased. The neighborhood is also very welcoming; every individual, regardless of background, religion, and skin color, is invited to come work, says Gendy, as he mentions that approximately 5,000 Sudanese are employed in waste collection and recycling in Cairo.
Gendy has big ambitions for the Zabaleen. His goal is to find enough recognition for small projects and factories in Manshiyat Naser so that they could grow bigger with the use of renewable solar energy. But to achieve this, more attention is essential from a government that can’t continue kicking the can down the road. The Zabaleen have largely demonstrated that they are capable of managing the refuse of a metropolis. They represent an immense opportunity to create the local green economy that Egypt, and the world, need – one that benefits us all.
