The Zabaleen: Cairo's Garbage Collectors (Part 2)

Garbage City - Cairo's dark and dirty underbelly. It's home to 50,000 Coptic Christians that make their living recycling the city's garbage. Why only Christians? Because they feed the organic waste to their pigs – and Muslims won’t touch pork.

You can learn a lot about a city from its trash. In Garbage City, they don’t just sort by garbage type, but also by brand. Among plastic bottle collectors, there’s an “American” pile.

• What one piece of garbage is sought by almost every collector?
• Cairo recycles over 85% of its garbage – more than any other city in the world. how did the Garbage People create such an efficient recycling system?
• Why was the swine flu so devastating to Cairo’s Garbage People – even though no pig ever tested positive in Egypt?

The Garbage People don’t just collect garbage – they remanufacture plastic forks into chairs and cans into shiny metal sheets.

But there is always one catastrophe away from starvation. First it was swine flu. Then the Egyptian government sold the garbage collection contract to foreign corporations. Lately China has stopped accepting recycled plastic.
When the Garbage People don’t work, Cairo’s streets overflow with waste.
But there is hope – and community. The Garbage People send their children to school, and dream of getting them out of garbage city. They've created a community with shops and cafes - they even have a mayor (unofficial). And they built themselves the world’s largest Coptic Christian Church – drilled out of a cave in the mountainside. More than anything, they are a strong community with deep family ties.
Many of Garbage City's residents would live there even if they didn't make their living off of trash.

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Category: Travel