Izbet Zabbaleen (Village of Scavengers) is an area decorated by garbage and inhabited by garbage collectors living on hills of trash. Houses are filled with trash and streets are piled up with garbage gathered from Cairo by locals who bring it to this area to be recycled.

Izbet Zabbaleen (Village of Scavengers) is an area decorated by garbage and inhabited by garbage collectors living on hills of trash. Houses are filled with trash and streets are piled up with garbage gathered from Cairo by locals who bring it to this area to be recycled.

George, 42, came from Sohag Governorate to Izbet Zabbaleen years ago to work with his uncle who is one of the oldest residents of the area. George works on a plastic waste-cleaning machine. Plastic waste, like empty water bottles, oil bottles and soft drinks bottles, enters plastic waste breakers before it reaches George who cleans it and sells it to plastic bottle factories.

George earns L.E. 300 a day (nearly US$40). He has, however, developed a chest allergy due to his constant exposure to chemical materials used in cleaning plastic, like chlorine and potassium, in addition to the extreme heat of water.

“I visit my five-member family in Sohag once every two months,” says George. “I can neither quit my job nor bring my family here due to the widespread diseases among Izbet Zabbaleen residents, like Hepatitis C and cancer.”

George says the most serious problem facing work is repeated water cuts that could last days. Residents buy water from outside the area, says George, but this cannot be relied on because cleaning machines consumes large amounts of water.

A community of self-made trash collectors

Garbage collectors first gathered in Izbet Ward in Sharabia Street in 1949, according to Isaac Bolos, head of the Association of Garbage Collectors (AGC), whose office is located in an area surrounded by garbage.

After repeated complaints, the garbage collectors were moved to Abu Wafia in Shubra El-Kheima in 1955 and stayed there until 1960. After more complaints, they moved to Imbaba, an agricultural area, which they rented in exchange for staying and breeding animals. They stayed there until 1970 when inhabitants of the elite Zamalek area complained to the governor.  From there the garbage collectors were moved to their current location in Menshiyet Nasir in Mokattam Mountain.

In 1970, that area was practically a desert, but a number of garbage collectors, having being kicked out of Imbaba by the government on the pretext that it was in the middle of a residential area, gathered their relatives, mostly from the governorates of Asyut and Sohag in Upper Egypt, to work in collecting garbage. They lived in small huts they built from tin, wood and cardboard and they led a primitive life with no services.

According to Bolos who founded the AGC in 1974 to make the voice of garbage collectors heard so that the government would provide them with basic utilities, the scavengers started collecting, sorting and selling garbage to paper, glass, tin, plastic and copper factories and they fed the remaining trash to pigs they were breeding.

Establishment of a hygiene authority

Before 1984, garbage collection from the area of Greater Cairo was not a difficult process because new cities and expansions had not appeared. The people of Izbet Zabbaleen used to do all the work on their own without governmental contribution. A presidential decree then was issued to establish a Hygiene Authority tasked with collecting garbage from main streets. Garbage collectors were responsible for collecting domestic trash. In 2002, however, the Egyptian government concluded the first garbage removal contract with Amal Arab, an Italian hygiene company. Since then, says Bolos, they have been dealing with the company that shares all the domestic garbage they collect and left all the garbage at their disposal.

In 1986, the area began witnessing a boom when the World Bank (WB) provided a grant to develop the area and supply it with the infrastructures of water, roads and sanitation. In 1993, however, the area suffered a large health disaster when a huge fire swept its main and only incinerator, claiming the lives of 40 people. When the government shut the incinerator down, says Bolos, the AGC addressed the WB, which then provided the Egyptian government with modern incineration equipment.

At the time, the Coptic Church provided soft loans for opening garbage recycling workshops, like plastic crushers, paper pressers, cloth choppers, foundries and glass stores. After a long period of selling garbage cheaply, household incomes started to increase. Saint Simon the Tanner Monastery, located at the heart of Mokattam Mountain next to Izbet Zabbaleen, distributes donations to poor families and helps them buy simple equipment to work in garbage recycling.

These donations, says Bolos, started a boom and the number of workshops ran as high as 700 in Menshiyet Nasir, in addition to other 700 in six other areas that recycle 9,000 tonnes of garbage. The current number of Izbet Zabbaleen residents is nearly 75,000.

Employment paid with health risks

Mohammad Eid, 50, came from Minya Governorate in Upper Egypt to work with his neighbor in a plastic melting plant to process plastic and sell it to plastic bag factories. He says the plant receives coloured bags in the form of small scraps and then it melts them using a melting machine operating at a very high temperature to form small beads, which it then sells to other factories.

Although Eid has Hepatitis C, he refuses to quit his job for fear for his family’s future. The most difficult thing he faces during his job is recurring power outages since the melting machine is electricity-powered. Besides, it takes over two hours to go back to the proper temperature to thaw plastic. In many occasions, Eid lost his daily wage due to power outages, especially in summer.

“The area has no standards for health safety,” says Saad Albert, the owner of a garbage separation plant. Albert and his wife and children work in that profession. The first floor of his house is filled with garbage. He collects trash from Shubra and brings it home to separate it into five different kinds (glass, plastic, cardboard, waste and iron) and then sells it to crushing plants.

When his eldest daughter Maryam comes back from university and his son Mina from his high school, they sit amid garbage to separate it. Albert’s wife organizes work time and helps all of them with their work.

Albert says a number of buyers come from outside the area to buy cardboard and glass and plastic is sold to factory owners in the area. Some of the waste, says Albert, is given to pigs as food. Pigs have been bred illegally since the government executed all pigs for fear of swine flu back in 2008. The remaining amount of waste is thrown in areas close to Izbet Zabbaleen.

Albert’s house has no access to a sewage system although a large number of the area’s houses do, so he uses neighborhood trucks to dispose of waste from time to time. According to him, the sewage problem is the area’s largest threat, because the huge amounts of industrial wastewater sometimes block the sewer system in the main streets of the area.

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