2.15 am. Rashid brings his little Bedford van to a stop and turns off the engine. He hops out, reaches into the back of the truck and pulls out his offa – a large woven basket that he swings onto his back, attaching it with a strap across his forehead. With a nod to the sleepy doorman, he slips into the dimly lit hallway of an apartment block and up a flight of narrow stone stairs.

He’s comfortably dressed for the job: trousers, rolled to the knee, a grey, open-necked shirt and flip-flops. Reaching the top, he starts down again at a jog, now pausing on each floor long enough to scoop up the bags and boxes of rubbish that have been left out on the landing, flinging them over his shoulder into the offa. At the truck, he dumps his load, swings himself up behind the wheel and we’re underway again.

This is Cairo – a noisy, stinking, congested mega-city of 16 million people – and it’s high summer. In the day, it’s swelteringly hot and you can’t move for the traffic. But at this hour, things are quiet and progress is rapid. We stop at a butcher’s to collect old bones. Rashid scoops up some cardboard that he spots lying by the side of the road with a grin of satisfaction.

Next stop is the basement of the Beirut Hotel, where Rashid climbs into the cavernous bins to retrieve the trash. He’s a small man – maybe 1.6 metres tall – but lithe and strong.

By the end of the night, he will have visited 500 apartments and carried half a tonne of garbage on his back, bound for his home in the sprawling Moqattam slum.

Rashid isn’t formally paid for collecting the trash. Indeed, some places actually charge him for the privilege. His recompense is the garbage itself – the daily assortment of kitchen slops, broken plastic, discarded card and paper, scrap metal, odd socks, chipped glass and other junk that he humps down stairs every night.

Rashid is one of the Zabbaleen – literally, ‘garbage people’ – of Cairo who, for half a century, have sustained themselves on the city’s discards. The Zabbaleen now number 40,000 and collect 4,000 tonnes of rubbish each day – about a third of Cairo’s output. The quantity is impressive. More striking still is the proportion (some 85 per cent) that gets reprocessed in Moqattam’s hive of small micro-enterprise recycling workshops.

In the past few years, the informal system has come under pressure from a municipal government keen to modernise. But the Zabbaleen have proved better adapted to Cairo’s rhythms and expectations than the European garbage-collection firms that have tried their luck here. Against the odds, the informal system has survived.

Trash traders
Coptic Christians from the south of Egypt, the Zabbaleen began trickling into Cairo during the 1940s, seeking relief from drought and poor harvests. They brought their pigs with them, along with an agricultural skill-set ill-suited to city life. Survival was uncertain. But they were natural entrepreneurs and were quick to spot the untapped economic potential in the city’s mountains of waste. Organic components could be used as pig feed and the rest either sold on, dumped in the streets or burned.

The Wahis – or ‘oases-dwellers’ – had controlled collection since the 1920s. They acted as brokers, and the Zabbaleen paid them in cash and recovered paper, which could be sold for profit. Garbage was an investment – and a profitable one. It yielded a better living than the desert wilderness, so Zabbaleen numbers grew.

There are now six separate Zabbaleen communities on the city’s fringes. Moqattam, home to 25,000 or so, is the largest and is best approached from the six-lane Autostrade, which runs east out of Cairo towards Nasr City. Here, the pungent scent of rotting food and animal manure mingles alluringly with the traffic fumes. Crossing the highway and picking your way over a disused railway track and its chaos of plastic bags, a series of narrow streets takes you uphill into the heart of the community.

Moqattam qualifies as a ‘Manta’a Ashwa’eya’ – literally, ‘informal area’ – although the inhabitants of Cairo refer to it more succinctly as zarayib (‘pigsty’). It’s a jumble of narrow dirt tracks, barely wide enough for the trucks and donkey carts that rumble through at every hour of the day and night. Raw sewage seeps from broken pipes. Rats, flies and mangy cats abound, not to mention the occasional goat, sheep or cow. And there is garbage everywhere, carpeting the streets, drifting in the breeze, lining the roads in waist-high piles. It clings to your feet; assaults your nostrils; sticks in the back of your throat. And it dictates the rhythms of daily life.

Garbage collectors such as Rashid comprise about 70 per cent of Moqattam’s population. The poorest of these are the ‘scavengers’ – families who can’t afford the use of a truck. Home is typically a rough assembly of brick and cement, several storeys high. The family lives upstairs, in rooms kept meticulously clean and decorated with bright furnishings, salvaged knick-knacks and posters of Coptic saints. At the back, a pen houses 30 or 40 small, black, garbage-fed pigs.

At street level, in an area open to the passing traffic, the women of the family squat in knee-high piles of rubbish, sorting through it by hand for up to 11 hours a day. This is where Rashid’s load will end up, to be sifted by his wife, Basma, into its key components: plastic, glass, metal, cardboard, cloth and organic matter. Slops are fed to the pigs and left to accumulate underfoot in a spongy mass. The rest is put into plastic bags or boxes to be sold on later in the day.

Sorting is an exhausting, unsavoury but highly skilled business. Over the years, donkey carts have been phased out and sewage, running water and electricity have been phased in. But this is one part of Zabbaleen
life that hasn’t modernised – partly because of resistance by the women of Moqattam themselves. They prefer to risk hepatitis than to wear gloves, for instance; gloves slow you down and may cause you to miss something valuable.

A recent NGO-sponsored plan to move waste-sorting out of the homes to a designated spot 50 kilometres away in the desert has met with a similar lack of enthusiasm. As things are, the health hazards are acute; but women can plan their own schedules, watch their children while they work, and socialise with their neighbours.

Once the rubbish has been sorted, all recovered materials are sold on to recyclers. These are the wealthiest 30 per cent, and they drive the garbage economy. In Moqattam’s winding alleyways, mountains of plastic, sorted by colour, edge up against stacked bales of compressed cardboard and paper. One neighbour specialises in rubber. A mound of sole-less shoes spills out of his doorway onto the street. A second heaves tubs full of bottle tops into the dark recesses of his workshop to be melted down for aluminium. A third sorts through a pile of yoghurt pots three metres high, separating those that are made from polyethylene from those made from polypropylene.

To the untrained eye, the scene is chaotic, but it embodies refined skill and technological sophistication. Plastic recycling, for instance, involves the shredding, washing, drying, melting, cooling and grinding of recovered plastic. A recycling workshop that can do all of this is a serious capital investment – and a possible path to prosperity. Aied, a second-generation plastic recycler, has built a several-storey villa on the edge of Moqattam from his plastic-recycling profits. He sells his product to Taiwan, where it’s turned into polyester jackets.

Aeid is proud of his business; he’s prouder still of the small garden he has planted on the edge of Moqattam. ‘I wanted to prove to anybody passing the entrance to the community that the garbage collectors care about their environment, that we are ambitious, that we believe in a better life, for ourselves and our children,’ he says.



Essential service
The Zabbaleen remain an underclass, but they are conscious of having triumphed against the odds in carving out a living for themselves, and they are proud of the job that they do for the city. ‘The Zabbaleen are supporting the national income of Egypt,’ says Shahid al-Muqaddis, who owns the local coffee shop. ‘We came from nothing. We used to live in shacks made from tin and wood. But now we have a new life. Nowadays, even the government is dealing with us, and we are on the map. We have a role.’

That role is a crucial one. Ezzat Naem tells us how visitors from Cairo hold their noses when they walk through Moqattam’s streets. ‘I ask them, are you hurt by this smell? They say yes.
I tell them, but this is your garbage. It is not ours. If you don’t like the smell, I could ask my people not to go to Cairo for three or four days, and let’s see what happens then.’

Besides pride in their role, the garbage collectors show a discernible appreciation of their own autonomy. They are businessmen, not scavengers. And they see garbage in terms of opportunity, rather than necessity.
This goes some way to explaining the fact that, if you ask people in Moqattam what they worry about, neither sanitation nor education, nor the quality of the environment, is first on the list. A much greater concern is the insecurity of their relationship with the city’s garbage – and the prospect that the government might, at any moment, stop them from doing this job.

Since 2002, this worry has had a specific focus. In order to formalise waste management in the city (and to enable a credible bid for the 2010 World Cup), the municipality hired four European firms to collect garbage from four quadrants of the city. This promised a more consistent service (poor areas are neglected by the Zabbaleen, since the rich areas have better quality garbage), and a way of resolving the chronic health and sanitation problems associated with rubbish sorting. The downsides were a vastly reduced recycling rate and the elimination of the Zabbaleen’s livelihood.

But European models turned out to be a bad fit for Cairo. Skips positioned on street corners were stolen at once, to be put to more creative use. And citizens used to the Zabbaleen’s door-to-door service refused to take their own garbage down to the street. There was even a court battle that challenged the constitutionality of appending a garbage collection fee to citizens’ utility bills. The Zabbaleen continued to come to the door and provide their usual service – sometimes paying to retain the right to collect – and so the old, informal system prevailed.

Five years later, all but one of the European companies have packed up and gone home. The remaining Italian company – AMA – has survived by employing some of the Zabbaleen, through brokers, to run the collection rounds.

The arrangement isn’t perfect. Corruption and bureaucracy mean that the garbage collectors are often not paid the wages they are due, despite the millions of Egyptian pounds paid to AMA each year. ‘It’s the middleman who’s getting rich,’ complains Dr Laila Iskandar, a long-time advocate for the Zabbaleen. ‘At the same time, the Zabbaleen are still using their own trucks; paying for them; paying for the gas; no uniforms; and no service upgrade in the city.’ There is a long way to go. But arguably, the AMA model is a decent first step towards sensibly integrating the informal system.

In the meantime, Rashid relishes the fact that he’s still his own boss, without a uniform, a contract or a schedule to keep to. At 4.30am, we stop in a roadside coffee shop so that he can smoke a shisha pipe and chat to his friends, who are playing dominoes.

We sit on the pavement and enjoy the night-time cool. At this time of day, Rashid says, he often feels as if all of that clean, fresh air has been put there specially for him, to refresh his lungs. ‘I, myself, enjoy working,’ he says. ‘And when I am working, I am alive. But I am dreaming of retirement. My dream is to go to a Western country to eat white bread.’

Journey of a Lifetime

The author, together with Bill Finnegan, visited the Zabbaleen after securing a Journey of a Lifetime award from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). The award is a grant of up to £4,000 for an original and inspiring journey to anywhere in the world, given to those with a curiosity about the world and a desire to communicate with a wider audience. The winner receives radio and broadcast training from the BBC, and records their journey for a BBC Radio 4 documentary.

To apply, simply visit www.rgs.org/journeyofalifetime and download the guidelines. You can also read about past winners and listen to their documentaries.

The deadline for applications for this year’s award will be in September.