One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure

Here’s how waste management works in the North:

First, we start with a standard of living based on high consumption rates.  In fact, it drives our economy. Second, we live in a disposable society that values convenience over all other factors.  Last, we pay to make the waste go away.  Sometimes they offer recycling, and sometimes we actually do it.  The main reason we don’t bother is that resource recovery is usually driven by law and public willingness/concern for the environment.  Only a few industries, such as aluminum, steel and baled plastics, are driven by potential profit.

Here’s how it works in the South:

Waste collection is spotty due to financial and/or institutional constraints.  You’re lucky if you’ve got the service.  If you don’t, sometimes community-based organizations will pick it up for a small fee.  Usually they use low-tech equipment (if any) to collect, and make up for it with manual labor.  Resource recovery is amazingly thorough “because this work is done in a very labour-intensive way and for very low incomes”.  You guessed it: these are usually marginalized, minority populations.

Profit Potential for under-utilized resources + Lack of govt services = Local innovation

The “culture” of formal sector vs informal waste management has always fascinated me.  When I read the encouraging story in Wheeler (p. 161) about Cairo moving towards being a zero-waste system I was thrilled.  I wanted to know more about the Zaballeen community and how they managed to collect, reuse, and recycle most of the waste produced by Cairo’s 15 million citizens.  What’s more, the article talks about the “active support of the city authorities” which really surprised me.  Turns out, the excerpt in Wheeler made it sound a lot better than reality.

The Zaballeen (Arabic for “garbage people”) make a living as a community by collecting and sorting Cairo’s waste, recycling an astonishing 80% of all wastes including plastics, metals, organics, paper, and clothing.  Theirs is one of the most efficient, albeit informal, systems in the world. 

Besides a recycling school and recently installing basic services such as electricity, sewerage, and water, “support” from the city is lacking.  The Zaballeen are an ethnic and religious minority, further stigmatized by their profession/way of life (and admittedly poor hygiene practices).  With little concern for impacting this community’s sole income source, Egypt recently awarded contracts to three multinational companies to handle Cairo’s waste collection.  The presence of these companies means less trash for the Zaballeen to collect, less recyclable material to sell abroad, and less income overall.  There is an excellent documentary about this community entitled Garbage Dreams (get it at the library) that addresses many of these complex issues.  

 Clip from Garbage Dreams

What strikes me most about the Zaballeen is their ability to literally turn trash into gold, and do it with immense efficiency.  Even though the contracted companies are only required by law to recycle a mere 20% of the total waste collected, they are already struggling to do what the Zaballeen have done for years.  One company has already been terminated for failing to keep the streets clean.  

 This is Mokattam, "home" for the Zabelleen

“In the case of solid waste management, cities in the North have much to learn from the ingenuity of waste recycling in the South” (Wheeler, p. 161).  Despite poor living conditions and outright discrimination, it seems like we could take a cue from the Zabelleen in terms of linking “resource conservation and waste reduction with job creation and local empowerment” (Roseland, p. 83).  In Garbage Dreams, a few of the boys from the Zaballeen community have an opportunity to go abroad to study recycling in the developed world.  Their observations?  “Here they have technology but no precision”.  So true.