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All day in Cairo, local Egyptians are methodically gathering rubbish by hand from bins,
alleys and streets, and filling large satchels with the garbage, which they carry away on their
backs. These people are called the zabaleen in Egyptian Arabic, meaning ‘garbage people’. The
zabaleen all but blend in among the denizens, tourists and researchers of bustling Cairo—you
could easily miss them. Yet, they administer an essential public service by collecting, disposing
of, and recycling the immense amounts of garbage that accumulate in this city of an estimated
They work in teams. They spend long days collecting refuse from the many districts of
sprawling Cairo, which they take back to their homes to sort through by hand for recyclables. It’s
The zabaleen, almost exclusively members of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, live in a
neighbourhood of the Cairo called Mansheiyet Nasser, often referred to as Garbage City. The
area was designated in the late 1960s to consolidate zabaleen neighbourhood. Today’s
Garbage City is situated near the Citadel and hidden from view in the Mokattam
escarpment. A monastery, dedicated to St. Simon the Tanner, is hidden in the caves here, and
tour busses drive up the escarpment road to that monastery, with the zabaleen pickup trucks
stacked impossibly high with bales of recyclable materials. These two very different worlds
existing next to each other is a distinctive characteristic of Cairene society: modernity and wealth
experience. Garbage is hauled back to this city, and sorted through by hand for recyclables. Men,
women and children take part in this task. One can see piles of glass, plastics and metals—all
sorted by colour and designation—and simply by peering into open rooms from the streets.
Young men operate belt-driven shredding machinery, rendering plastics and sundries into
tattered fragments—the shredding machines making exerted high-pitched shrieks as the materials
are fed into them, then rent asunder. Young girls, next to their mothers, pick through household
refuge, tossing empty tuna fish cans into a pile in the corner. Stacks of electronic equipment fill
rooms: computer screens, televisions, adding machines. Each block seems to specialise in a
And though this neighbourhood is often referred to as a slum, the standard of living here
is visibly higher than many other poor Cairo neighbourhoods. There is ongoing construction of
new apartments, and many balconies were freshly painted in bright, lively pastels and with
decorative pottery on display. The presence of a post office indicates this neighbourhood is
officially recognized by the government, not something all neighbourhoods in Cairo can claim.
But there are other perspectives on the machinations of this neighbourhood, aside from
relative prosperity and environmentally conscious industry. The zabaleen were understandably
suspicious and guarded as I wandered through Garbage City, perhaps well familiar with the
The only school I saw, a grammar school, did not have murals of teddy bears and alphabets; it
instead had murals of trash collection, and I was told they don’t teach grammar and maths—they
only teach which items to separate and collect from rubbish bins. The children here are born into
Aside from the long hours required to manually collect the garbage, haul it back home,
separate it, bundle it and take to the appropriate recycling center for money, there are health
issues involved with this occupation: exposure to hepatitis, infection and bacteria. Cairo’s pig
population (350,000 animals) was recently culled in hysterical reaction to the Swine Flu virus—
Cairo had not been prepared for the Bird Flu, and was criticised for a casual response. But the
pigs were not infected with the H1N1 virus, and the pigs used to eat tonnes of the organic waste
—only now the waste is accumulating inside Garbage City. Dead rats were conspicuous in the
alleys, and local clinics are reporting a surge in rat bites among the zabaleen.
The pig cull, which is considered a slight to the Coptic Christian minority by a Muslim
majority parliament, also had financial implications, as many zabaleen supplemented their
income by selling the pork—the meat, considered a primary source of protein in the local diet is
now gone altogether. Malnutrition and anaemia rates are expected to spike in Garbage City.
The future of Cairo’s zabaleen remains uncertain. There is talk of acquiring modern
European recycling machinery and waste disposal methods to replace the current system of
sorting through rubbish by hand. But adaptation is a more common a trait of the zabaleen than
Cairo 2009.