What lies in the shadow of the mountain?

Are the photos below real or from a recent Disney/Pixar motion picture?





To enter the area of Cairo known as Manshiyet Nasr, or Medinat Zibalah (Garbage City), is to enter an alternate reality reminiscent of Wall-E. It shows us a future where our trash has become such a problem that we must stack heaping bag after heaping bag in empty, derelict apartments until the garbage reaches the roof.

This is the world of the Zabaleen, the garbage collectors of Cairo. They’ve been around for quite awhile, probably since Nasser forced a large number of Coptic immigrants to Cairo into this small area. Since the 1960s it has grown to support about 40,000 people, all of whom work in this community as processors of Cairo’s prodigious waste. Every day they go around on trucks and collect up to a third of Cairo’s garbage, putting it in bags and trucking it back to their city to be sorted. Each family and individual has a particular job, whether it’s sorting bottles or collecting paper materials for recycling. They then sell these recyclable materials like metals and plastics to companies for a small profit, which gives them enough to scrape a living.




These people have some beautiful places of worship.







"The Cafeteria"


View of the Citadel from Manshiyet Nasr


Other mosques:






The Zabaleen clean up Cairo for little or no cost to the residents, and it shows. Recently the Egyptian government has been allowing European companies to start collecting Cairo’s garbage, which unfortunately threatens the Zabaleen’s only source of income as the multinationals have larger machines and could take over the garbage market. But many people in Cairo actually say the Zabaleen are much more efficient, as the European companies only recycle 20% of Cairo’s garbage (the rest goes in the landfill), while the Zabaleens’ system turns out a much higher percentage of recyclable materials.

The Zabaleen, being mostly Copts, don’t have the same restrictions on working with pigs that Muslims do, so they developed a use for these animals: having them eat the organic waste they collect from the streets of Cairo. Last year, in response to the outbreak of swine flu in Egypt, the government ordered the killing of all pigs in Cairo. 300,000 pigs in Garbage City were killed, which not only took out a large portion of the Zabaleen economy but also lessened their incentive to clean up the organic trash on the streets. Therefore: no pigs = dirty streets.

This system is a perfect example of where sustainability becomes a part of a community’s interest not for their ideological beliefs, but because it is necessary for them to survive. Without the ability to recycle garbage, the Zabaleen would have nothing to gain by processing Cairo’s trash.



Maybe, as our society becomes more and more wasteful and the possibility of a Wall-E-like future grows, we can learn something from them.