Historically marginalized and evicted from Giza in 1970, a community of Coptic Christians took up residence at the foot of the Mokattam hills in south east Cairo.

Burned by their previous experience, the religious group hesitated to build permanent churches in their settlement, which is now lined with mountains of trash, until 1976, when a fire broke out in Manshiyat Nasir.

The first 1,000 square foot cave church was carved at the foot of Mokattam mountain. The largest in the Middle East – the Monastery of St. Simon the Tame, a Coptic Christian saint – has an ampitheater that boasts a seating capacity of 20,000 devotees.

St. Bola’s Church, St. Marks Church, and St. Simon the Tanner’s Hall are among the six additional cave churches carved out of the rock, which continue to serve the community to this day.

Despite their status as outcasts, the Zabaleen have proven themselves to be not only excellent craftsmen whose attention to detail in the cave churches is sensational, but their garbage recycling operations are exceptionally efficient.

The subject of a popular documentary, the Zabaleen also used to raise pigs, which are considered haram (unclean) by Muslims, to manage Cairo’s organic waste as well. But then the government culled most of them in response to the swine flu epidemic in 2009.

A small handful of pigs have made a quiet comeback since then, though they remain in hidden corners of Garbage City.

Getting pork out of Egypt

Although Egypt has lost a lot of its tourists as a result of the post-revolution instability and occasional bouts of violence, the Cave Churches continue to attract a few.

If you are amazed about the power of garbage collectors, see how the Turkish garbage collectors in Ankara have built a massive library from books they found in the trash.

Images via Flickr. This story was updated in 2024 by Karin Kloosterman.

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Tetra Pak sold roughly 1.625 billion packages in Egypt in 2011, of which only 20 percent were recycled. That’s a lot of untreated waste, but now the company has pledged $340,000 to boost the country’s recycling capacity. They want to make their business more sustainable. 

The Swedish company teamed up with Egyptian shopping bag manufacturer Akef Pack-tec to build a new recycling factory by the fourth quarter of 2014, but first it is necessary to improve the country’s recycling culture, which is currently non-existent.

Whereas many westerners can drop their pile of recyclables in a blue bin on the street or at a recycling center, such facilities have yet to be developed in Egypt. So it makes little sense to construct a recycling center without also establishing a way for the recyclables to make them there in the first place.

Aware of this challenge, Tetra Pak and Akef have conceived a multi pronged approach to their recycling initiative.

Mohamed Ismail, Environment and Marketing Manager for Tetra Pak Egypt told Food Production Daily that they want to build a collection stream in such a way that is both profitable and attractive to waste collectors.

Waste management in Egypt has a storied history, and the government can take very little credit. Instead, the Zabaleen, a group of Coptic Christians hidden away in a crusty corner of Cairo, have taken it upon themselves to recycle a great deal of the city’s organic and solid waste.

Over the years, their operation has become increasingly more sophisticated, and many of the materials harvested from the process are recycled into crafts and other goods that generate revenue.

But this is an unofficial waste management project that is almost embarrassing for Egypt. Tetra Pak’s new program can help to elevate this and similar initiatives.

Tetra Pak and partners will provide the funds and tools to build a recycling center, but entrepreneurs working with NGOs will be required to take ownership as well with a cost share program and generate performance reports in order to make the system self-sustaining.

Tetra Pak Egypt Managing Director Anders Lindgren told Daily News Egypt that the Ministry of Environmental affairs is looking for partners to achieve [the ministry’s goals as regards the] recycling project.”

“Around 90% of the recycled used beverage cartons [UBCs] are Tetra Pak’s,” he added.

By 2016, the company plans to inject further funds such that a full 50 percent of the waste they generate can be recycled.

Currently, most of Egypt’s Tetra Pak supplies are produced in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

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Garbage city and the Zabaleen people, who turn mountains, literally mountains (or buildings) full of organic and inorganic waste into something useful has been something of a fascination for the outside world.

Teams of architects have envisioned a way to turn the teeming waste that accumulates in this corner of the city into an energy-generating powerhouse and a wonderful film was recently made to document how the Zabaleen work to recycle so much trash.

The Zabaleen have suffered since 2009. The pigs were essential to the work of consuming organic waste.

Plus, after the culling, thousands of butchers were left without work, according to VOA news, and there was no way to process the waste generated by Cairo’s 18 million residents.

The pigs were controversial – particularly in a Muslim country – but they were effective, and now there are a still a few pigs quietly doing their good work.

“Tucked behind mountains of trash and a wall of flies is a pen full of pigs – the ultimate in organic waste management – and they are making a small, clandestine comeback,” wrote Elizabeth Arrott.

But not everyone is willing to acknowledge they are there, as if drawing attention to them could provoke health officials to clamp down.

Adel Ragi, who is a member of the Garbage Collector’s Union, told the paper that foreign companies have been brought in to tackle Cairo’s phenomenal waste problem, but they just dump the waste on landfills. This is unhelpful – particularly for organic waste, which produces methane when improperly composted.

Christian farmers are trying to set up a new slaughterhouse in order to process the pigs, but they have experienced a delay from authorities.

A Coptic priest who lives above Garbage City calls the pushback a form of religious intolerance since Muslims don’t eat pork, which is perfectly acceptable among Christians.

:: VOA

Image of pigs near pigsty, Shutterstock

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Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan: Walking through the vast expanse of white tents, dirt “roads” and masses of families huddled closely together for warmth, if you ask what they most need, the answer, without pause, is simple: blankets. In late November and early December, I was walking through the Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan along the Syrian border, and the Syrian refugees are surprisingly open and frank.

Despite the destruction and death that they witnessed across the border, they remain optimistic about the future. As I was leaving the camp, an idea struck me: why not use biofuel to give power to the tents, at least deliver some form of heat to combat the encroaching winter cold?

Back in Amman, Jordan, I talked to a number of NGOs who listened patiently to this idea. They would nod and smile, say this could be a useful idea, but how could it be implemented, was the question that continued to be broached. They are right. Without adequate funding to supply the tens of thousands of refugees with blankets, biofuel is not high on anyone’s agenda.

A few years ago in Cairo, I met T.H. Culhane, a professor from the University of California at Los Angeles who had begun to develop biofuel and biogas for residents in Cairo’s downtrodden outskirts to deliver enough power for a few hours of cooking. His model was simple.

Instead of maintaining the rigid plans for the digesters that he and others had been using, Culhane compiled local material and, in a sense, winged it, employing  local people to help create functioning digesters that are able to provide homes with a few hours of gas daily. Trash can also be employed to give heat, as Israel has seen possible.

Cutting costs was easier than expected. He said in 2010 that they could make a digester for less than $200 and as the communities continues to see that it can be successful, he envisions more digesters coming to  fruition as funding comes in.

Biogas can be used as a low-cost fuel in any country for any heating purpose, such as cooking. In Egypt, Culhane employed kitchen waste as the main source of making the digesters work. Residents could collect the organic waste left over from the day’s cooking, take it up to the  digester, put it in and this releases methane that can then travel  through pipes into the stove or oven for cooking purposes.

My idea for Syrian camps, which when I went back to Zaatari the following day became clear to its validity, was to employ the refugees to help use the leftover waste from the cooking process to develop biogas that could be used for mobile heaters that could be given to families with young children, the most in danger of succumbing to the winter elements.

While this idea needs, and deserves, more research, I believe that following the Culhane model, even reaching out to him in particular, could help bring some warmth to a people in desperate need in order to survive the harsh winter without the friendly confines of a home.

Above image by Joseph Mayton for Green Prophet

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This was a dangerous promise to make given that so many of the systems required for effective waste management have long since eroded in the capital (if they ever existed.) Meanwhile, the Zabaleen have been keeping Cairo from being completely buried by waste – all of their own accord – by collecting, recycling and sorting what they can. But the importance of the service they provide has long been overlooked by government.

No rest for the recyclers

Spirit of Youth is a non-government organization initially founded in 2004 to represent the Zabaleen – a group of minority Coptic Christians who subsist on the meager proceeds of recycling Cairo’s waste. They received virtually no support from the last regime and now there is a chance they face a similar fate with the new government.

The NGO’s director Ezzat Naiem told Egypt Independent that the Clean Homeland campaign is nothing more than political propaganda and that the campaign managers have declined to discuss the city’s waste management issues with them despite their longstanding experience.

According to the paper, Spirit of Youth has established no fewer than 38 legitimate companies among the Zabaleen trash sorters, who mostly populate the Mokkatam village known as Garbage City.

Roughly 150,000 Zabaleen workers sort about 8,000 tons of waste per day, which amounts to roughly 60% of the capital’s daily waste output. Naiem recommends formalizing this system so that the Zabaleen can actually receive financial rewards for their services.

$1 a month per family is all it takes

Under Naiem’s recommended approach, each family living in buildings throughout Cairo could be required to pay LE5 a month (under $1) to have their garbage collected and sorted.

“With that sort of money, the Zabaleen could personally separate the garbage, recycle what they can, and then send the organic waste to compost sites and the remaining waste to the appropriate facilities — which they do already, but lack finances and motivation to tackle the problem properly,” Naiem told Egypt Independent.

But campaign supervisor Ali Shelby said in a statement that the Clean Homeland campaign has other plans that take inspiration from Turkey’s approach to waste management (links to PDF). He added, however, that the new waste management strategy will involve both multinational companies and the Zabaleen.

In short, it’s not yet clear where the Zabaleen stand under President Morsi, who vowed when he was first elected that no minority religious groups would be marginalized during his presidency. Let’s hope he makes good on his promise. Because if the Zabaleen can’t sort trash, what will they do instead?

:: Egypt Independent

Image credit: Trash in Egypt, Shutterstock

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Heaping urban trash may be an even more daunting global phenomenon than climate change, the World Bank warned in a recent report. What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management reveals that by 2025, city dwellers could produce as much as 2.2 billion tonnes of solid waste a year, up 70% than the 1.3 billion tonnes currently generated.

More waste is generated in cities than rural areas because more packaging is used and less is recycled, and because people living in rural areas are less likely to have a consumption-driven lifestyle. But getting a handle on the problem, particularly in developing countries, requires a strong social contract between the municipality and community, according to the report – a serious challenge in parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

City dwellers will produce 1.42 kg of trash per day by 2025 

By 2025, 4.3 billion living in cities throughout the planet will generate about 1.42 kg/capita/day of municipal solid waste, which will create a huge environmental and financial burden for the local governments tasked with managing it.

Untreated solid waste emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and chemicals from plastic and other packaging leach into waterways. The World Bank sites untreated waste as one of the major causes of pollution in developing countries that are ill-equipped to handle mounting waste.

Global management of solid waste could cost as much as $375 billion each year, according to the report’s authors, who add that this is a “relatively silent problem that is growing daily.”

We’ve seen children running through toxic trash piles in the souqs of Tunis and we have watched families eat their lunch in so-called green spaces in Cairo,  surrounded by coke cans, koshari packaging and other waste.

A major wake up call

While many people have grown blind to the problem, the World Bank urges policymakers to consider the report as a major wake up call.

“The challenges surrounding municipal solid waste are going to be enormous, on a scale of, if not greater than, the challenges we are currently experiencing with climate change,” said Dan Hoornweg, a senior urban specialist at the development lender and co-author of the report.

Design has a huge role to play in addressing waste problems. The amount of packaging used for products needs to be reduced, recycled and reusable, preferably, and excess consumption has to be curtailed. More recycling programs are necessary and the public needs to become more informed about the origin and destination of their consumables.

We only have one planet. Let’s not bog it down with trash.

Image credit: Trash in Egypt, Shutterstock

More on Trash in the Middle East:
Zabaleen Film Portrays Cairo’s Garbage City People

Mekano Designs Renewable Energy Skyscraper for Cairo’s Filthy Garbage City

Egyptian Brothers Design a Clever Separator for Gulf Recyclables

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