Recycling Cairo’s trash for free while providing employment to tens of thousands, the Zabbaleen have much to teach other cash-strapped cities.

Piles of garbage line the streets of Manshiyat Naser in Cairo, Egypt. Credit: Jaclynn Ashly.

In the scorching afternoon heat, a few large refuse trucks barrel down the streets of the Manshiyat Naser neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt. They are filled to the brim with waste, the main feature of this urban scene. Waste spills out of the entrances of homes. It piles up on rooftops. It is strewn along avenues.

The nickname for this area, nestled into the base of the Mokattam Mountain, is, appropriately, “Garbage City”. And here, garbage is gold.

As the growling trucks come to a halt, girls and women – old and young – crowd around. Laughing and chatting with friends and relatives, they offload items, collect them into their homes, and start to sort through them.

This street in Egypt’s capital is one of countless nodes in what might be the world’s most efficient and sustainable recycling system. Germany, the country with the highest recycling rate in the world, recycles about 66% of its waste. The informal networks that manage refuse in this half of Cairo are estimated to recycle over 80% of garbage they collect.

Moreover, much of the waste they find new uses for is plastic. Every year, barely 9% of the 460 million metric tons of plastic produced worldwide is recycled. Most of the rest is discarded into the environment where it chokes marine wildlife, contaminates soil, and poisons groundwater.

The operations of Cairo’s unique community of informal recyclers – known as the Zabbaleen – have evolved organically over several decades. Today, almost all of the 100,000 residents of Manshiyat Naser, the capital’s main recycling hub, live off or are involved in garbage-related activities. Each family has its own particular role in a process that spans from the collection and transportation of household waste to sorting, washing, processing, and production.

In some families, the men and boys will go door-to-door, collecting about 30-40 kg of garbage each day. Back at their homes, women and girls will remove the organic waste to feed to animals and then categorise the rest into plastics, metal, cardboard, and fabric. The plastics are then sub-divided into bottles, bags, and miscellaneous hard plastics. Once a week, the accumulated 300-400 kg of garbage will be sold to other families, who will further sort the items by material and colour. They will then sell this cargo onto one of the few hundred households in Manshiyat Naser that own machines that can wash, granulate, or pelletise the plastic.

The resulting material is then sold to factories. Plastic pellets can make their way to Cairo, Alexandria, or the Nile Delta to be manufactured into all manners of recycled products – from buckets and brooms to jugs and flip-flops. Granulated water bottles may be turned into carpets, curtains, and clothing that is then exported all around the world.

Ayman Agayby, a member of the Zabbaleen garbage recyclers, sitting with his son outside their home in Manshiyat Naser, Egypt. Credit: Jaclynn Ashly.

The Zabbaleen’s activities have enormous positive repercussions for the environment. They reduce the need to produce new plastic, 99% of which is made from fossil fuels. And they dramatically cut the amount of waste that would otherwise be burned or deposited in landfills, both of which would release huge amounts of greenhouse gases and pollute local ecosystems.

Recycling in Cairo is also good business. A ton of plastic can sell for $860, and residents say the industry has ensured there is zero unemployment in the neighbourhood.

“There’s never a day without work,” boasts Ayman Agayby, 28, sitting outside his home as he and his family sort undulating hills of plastic bags by colour. “As long as the garbage keeps coming, we will always have jobs…We make enough to live comfortably and send our children to school.”

The abundance of work in Manshiyat Naser also means there is little need to see others as rivals.

“We all have a lot of respect between each other,” says Romani Badir, 55. “We don’t need to compete. Actually, our system works so well because we all cooperate with one another. There’s enough garbage and work for everyone to play a role.”

Badir first began helping in the family business half a century ago when he was just four years old. He describes how, since then, useful knowledge has been passed around and through the generations. Part of his job, for instance, involves sorting plastics by type, separating out polyethylene from polypropylene and other materials. Etched symbols provide one way to decipher between the kinds of plastic, but the Zabbaleen have developed another method over time.

“We can put a plastic piece into a bucket of water and if it floats in the water then it is one of two materials,” explains Badir. “If it sinks, then it means it could be one of another two materials. Then we burn a piece of the item and if the smoke is blue, then it is one kind of material. If the smoke is black, then it must be another material.”

Many other forms of specialist expertise have developed over the decades to deal with the fast-proliferating range of objects being disposed of.

“Every day we process different items,” says Sheata Abu Diem, 57, as he unloads a bundle of discarded plastic flower pots he has just bought from a family of sorters. “Today we are processing flower pots. Yesterday, it was yoghurt cups. Tomorrow it will be something else.”

“God decides what we will recycle each day,” interjects his wife, Karima.

Sheata Abu Diem (second left) and his family unload plastic flower pots for recycling. Credit: Jaclynn Ashly.

From pig-rearing to plastic

This sophisticated system of garbage collection and recycling has gradually evolved over almost a century. It was in the 1940s that those who would become known as the Zabbaleen – Egyptian Arabic for “garbage people” – first arrived in Cairo. Most were Coptic Christians from the rural province of Assiut 400km south of the capital.

By this time, there was already a nascent waste collection service in parts of the city, managed by migrants from the western Dakhla oasis known as the Waahis. They gathered used paper from households and sold it to businesses to use as fuel to heat public baths or cook the popular breakfast food ful medames.

The Zabbaleen, who had been farmers, spotted an opportunity. They forged an agreement with the Waahis whereby they would take over garbage collection. The new migrants would hand over the paper to their partners but keep the rest. At that point, that meant food and organic waste, which they would use as fodder for raising pigs and goats, a practice that continues up until today.

As time went on and Cairo grew, other materials – such as glass, plastic, and aluminium – became a common part of the city’s waste. The Zabbaleen repurposed these to manufacture crude household items such as clothing pegs, ice cream spoons, lollipop sticks, and paper stampers.

Meanwhile, the growth of private baths and kerosene meant paper was no longer necessary for fuel. The Waahis instead began making money as middlemen, collecting monthly fees from residents as they assigned additional routes, streets, and buildings for garbage collection. This arrangement situated the Zabbaleen, who were mostly illiterate, in a dependent and exploitable position. They got a small fraction of the regular payments. However, they knew that the real money was not in collection, but recycling.

In the 1980s, by which time Manshiyat Naser had been connected to Cairo’s electricity and water grids, the Zabbaleen began investing their personal funds into mechanising garbage collection and purchasing refuse trucks. In the 1990s, as formal plastic recycling factories emerged in Egypt, they acquired machines to process plastic into granules or pellets to sell on.

With the proceeds from these activities, the Zabbaleen began establishing community-based organisations and improving the infrastructure of their settlements. They enrolled increasing numbers of their children in schools, especially girls, and introduced health programmes that reduced the neonatal mortality rate.

More relatives, meanwhile, continued to arrive from rural areas as entire extended families became employed in the industry. While remaining entirely informal and based on communal relationships, the Zabbaleen’s activities grew along with the city and became increasingly sophisticated.

The plastic processing machine at Abu Diem’s home in Manshiyat Naser. Credit: Jaclynn Ashly.

Badir recalls helping his father collect garbage on a donkey cart when he was a small child in the 1970s. At the time, he was one of only five children in the neighbourhood to go to school, after which he would hurry home to help with the family business. A generation later, Badir was able to send all four of his children not just to school but university, though they all continue to help in the garbage work.

“Since they were very small I have been teaching them the knowledge of this recycling work, so they will all continue with this business regardless of their degrees,” says Badir, who speaks fluent English and French. This story is common around Manshiyat Naser, where family enterprises provide sustainable and lucrative employment that is largely shielded from broader economic slumps.

According to Badir, who is also secretary for the Association of Garbage Collectors for Community Development, the industry has also attracted tens of thousands of migrant workers from Upper Egypt and refugees from Sudan. “We give them a place to stay, food to eat with us, everything,” he says. “In exchange, they work with us and help us make more money.”

Some residents say that even educated Egyptians are turning to trash to make a living. Abu Diem, a professional electrical technician, tells African Arguments that he did not initially choose to work in Manshiyat Naser, but ended up here. “This was where we got a chance to make money,” he says. “The economy is not good in Egypt. It’s difficult to find jobs and especially manual work is never consistent.”

Over eight decades from when their predecessors first settled in Cairo, the people now known as the Zabbaleen reside in six neighbourhoods to which they bring waste to sort. The largest is Manshiyat Naser, where about 700 families own collection enterprises, 200 operate small- and medium-scale recycling businesses, and 120 own trading enterprises.

Badir says of the 20,000 tons of waste Cairo produces daily, the six Zabbaleen neighbourhoods recycle 11,000 tons, with Manshiyat Naser alone accounting for 5,000.

“We are doing more than half the work for the city,” says Badir proudly, and at no cost to the city.

“They tried to implement a European system”

The Zabbaleen’s relationship with officials, however, has not always been smooth. In 2003, the Egyptian government attempted to privatise waste services by signing contracts worth up to $50 million with multinationals, according to Wael Salah Fahmi, professor of urban design at Cairo’s Helwan University.

Under these agreements, the corporations employed the Zabbaleen to continue gathering garbage but put an end to the door-to-door collections that had been running for decades. Instead, the companies set up large containers on the streets into which residents were expected to deposit their waste.

“It ended very badly,” says Laila Iskander, Egypt’s former minister for environment affairs and chair of the development firm CID Consulting. “They tried to implement a European system that depends on these waste pooling sites to reduce the cost of labour. But peoples’ already-established habits did not work well with that.”

The streets of Cairo became coated in garbage. “Children would steal the wheels and play with them,” continues Iskander, a leading expert on Cairo’s waste management system. “Whole containers were stolen and sometimes repurposed to store water during water cuts. They attracted stray dogs and cats.”

The Zabbaleen were not impressed. Badir, who helped negotiate with the multinationals, says the salaries were initially so low that it was “not enough to even cover the fuel for the trucks”. Eventually, the salaries were raised, but many Zabbaleen nonetheless bypassed the companies and continued their informal door-to-door collections.

“They were happy to continue collecting the waste for nothing because their lives relied on the recyclables,” says Iskander. “They are not actually garbage collectors, but recyclers.”

According to CID Consulting, the multinationals were only required to recycle 20% of the waste, with most of it going into landfills.

The experiment at privatisation was a colossal failure. The systems implemented were unsuitable to the context and the wage-based approach undermined the innovation and self-motivation that had characterised the informal sector.

“Because our families rely on this work, and the more we recycle the more money we get, everyone is trying their hardest to recycle the maximum amount possible,” says Badir. “When I am walking home and, on the way, I find two cartons or bottles or cans on the street, I stop and pick them up. Sure, this is cleaning the environment that I live in, but it also gives me more money to recycle it and reuse it.”

Despite the fiasco, the government was legally unable to rescind the contracts for ten years. After this, Cairo’s waste management system reverted to the previous arrangement. Today, two of the city’s four zones – the Giza and Qalyubia governorates – contract the Zabbaleen to collect waste door-to-door via the Waahi middlemen. The other two zones contract waste collection services to Egyptian companies through municipalities.

More recent interactions with multinationals have been more productive. Since 2019, three global food and drink giants – Nestlé, Pepsi and Heineken – have worked with residents to collect and process bottles made from recyclable PET plastic. This time the approach has been devised to suit the local context. According to Iskander, whose firm CID Consulting co-designed the project with Nestlé Egypt, the initiative has seen the Zabbaleen collect 44,000 tons of PET bottles.

“That’s a lot of plastic,” she says. “This proved once again that [the Zabbaleen] are principle stewards of the environment and it showed the formal sector that they are also the main source of feedstock for the industry.”

The initiative was put on hold last year while the Egyptian government develops standards for its Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy, which makes producers liable for their products along the entire lifecycle. Before the government operationalises these policies, the multinationals are not able to officially track their progress.

An aerial view of Manshiyat Naser where the Zabbaleen collect and sort through tonnes of garbage daily. Credit: Jaclynn Ashly.

“We are very proud”

Looking ahead, Iskander emphasises that any governmental reforms or improvements to Cairo’s waste management system should be done “with the [Zabbaleen], not around them”. She says that a priority ought to be finding alternatives to the collectors bringing organic waste home, possibly by providing residents two separate containers to put their refuse. “In the heart of Cairo, nobody wants smelly organic waste to ruin the health and cleanliness of the city,” says Iskander.

She also explains that CID Consulting is working to help change the Zabbaleen’s official occupations on their identity cards to “recyclers”. They have succeeded with about 300 IDs, she says, and hope to complete half a million.

“The perceptions of waste people everywhere in the world…are always negative because they deal with waste and dirt,” says Iskander. “In reality, they are not scavengers. They are recyclers. We are trying globally to improve [this profession’s] image by explaining to everyone what they do for the city, for climate change, our health, and the material economy.”

Badir points out that the term Zabbaleen is not an insult but agrees that “garbage person” is too limited. “We are very proud of this name,” he says. “The problem is that it doesn’t accurately describe who we are. This term is a name for someone producing garbage, while we are recycling and cleaning the garbage.”

The term also does not capture the innovative economy of their work. Iskander argues that Cairo’s informal system provides a powerful example for cash-strapped towns around the world. In places where funding municipal waste collection may be unfeasible, an informal system in which collectors keep full revenues from the sale of recyclables could provide a similar service while also creating employment, reducing pollution, and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

“It is an extremely relevant model for situations where communities and cities cannot cover the cost of waste cleaning services,” says Iskander. “The Cairo model has succeeded and been sustained because the trouble of collecting and not getting paid adequate fees has been compensated by the revenue from the trade and processing of recyclable materials.”

The positive contributions the Zabbaleen have made to the environment are not lost on them.

“We have a lot to teach the world,” says Badir, who has been invited to speak about Manshiyat Naser’s recycling activities at conferences in France, Belgium, South Africa, and Vietnam. “From the time our children are very young, we explain to them that what we are doing is protecting the environment. We teach them that cardboard cartons come from trees. If I can recycle 1,000 tons of cartons per day, I am making good money for my family and at the same time I am protecting maybe 5,000 tons of trees per day.

“We raise our children to know how important this recycling is for the earth and all its creatures. The trees produce oxygen, which humans need to stay breathing. So if I can recycle even a single item, then I am protecting human life all over the planet.”