Piles of trash among Egypt’s many sorrows
Morsi inherits pile of problems from Mubarak, including tons of uncollected garbage in Cairo
CAIRO—The pile of trash overwhelmed the median divider on Ahmed Zaki Street and spilled into oncoming traffic— egg shells, rotten eggplants, soiled diapers, bottles, broken furniture, junked TV sets. Flies swarmed and the summer sun baked up a powerful stench.
Then Kawther Ahmed and her mom came out to add their plastic bag of household trash. The garbage collectors hadn't been by for two days, said Ahmed, 25, and the metal trash bins in the south Cairo neighborhood, called Dar el-Salam or “House of Peace,” had disappeared, probably sold for scrap metal. “What can we do?” She asked.
Egypt's newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, is under growing pressure to answer that question.
He already faces a host of challenges: from secular Egyptians worried about his Islamist doctrines; from militants trying to stoke conflict with Israel, and from the poverty and joblessness that fed the Arab Spring and brought down the three-decade dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
Priorities
To all those, add the rising tide of garbage in Cairo, the world's largest Arab city. Morsi declared it one of his top five priorities, promising to clean up the streets within 100 days. In so doing, he gave the electorate a powerful way of measuring his abilities, and it looks increasingly certain that 100 days will be nowhere near enough.
Cairo's waste management problem began to get acute a decade ago as the capital's old system, simple but reliable, became swamped by population growth. A government modernization effort flopped. A swine flu panic prompted the mass slaughter of the pigs that recy- cled Cairo's organic garbage; the city's metal trash bins were easy prey for thieves, especially during the global scrap metal boom.
The collapse of police forces in the revolution of early 2011 means that no one is enforcing what few rules there are.
In Dar-el-Salam, as in many other parts of the city of 18 million, there is no one to hold back the “nabasheen,” the diggers— young men and women who rummage through the bags of plastic, glass and cardboard and leave the organic stuff to rot in the streets.
Interwoven
Morsi is wading into a landfill of interwoven problems. Rival collectors vying for the big business of trash fight over turf that used to be parceled out in an orderly way among a fixed number of garbage-collecting clans. Layers of corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy choke the system. The collapse of police forces in the revolution means that no one is enforcing what few rules there are.
As a result, Cairenes end up dumping much of their daily output of 17,000 tons of garbage on the street.
“We have designed an unsustainable system for the city,” said Laila Iskandar, an expert in waste management. “It is a chain and no one thinks of the chain. Only the end point ... out of sight, out of mind.”
In late July, Morsi launched a “Clean Homeland” campaign, giving free brooms and plastic bags to volunteers from civic groups and the Muslim Brotherhood to which Morsi belongs. They hit several Cairo districts, helped by local authorities, for two days and then turned it into a weekly campaign. They swarm the streets, removing piles of trash. But the garbage quickly returns.
In Ahmed's neighborhood, residents say, the volunteers kept watch for hours to fend off dumpers and diggers. “Even the girls were collecting garbage. The street was sparkling,” said Mamdouh Gamea, a dentist. “But it didn't last. It is a matter of behavior.”
Solutions
Waleed el-Senousi, manager of the Clean Homeland campaign and hygiene file in Morsi's office, said the idea was to define the problems and come up with solutions. The government, he said in an interview, wants to tackle the problem on a national level and issue bids for a more technological system that includes burning waste for energy.
But experts fear they will trample the traditional systems that have served Cairo well.
The traditional way is that of the zabbaleen, up to 150,000 informal garbagemen who go door to door and collect trash for a minimal fee, transport it to their own neighborhoods and sort out the recyclables. The organic material is fed to pigs. (It's a Christian-dominated industry; Muslims shun the animals.)
The result has been an astounding recycling rate of around 80 percent, and an informal recycling business in which they invested a cumulative $150 million over the past 40 years, according to Iskandar. In Manshiet Nasr, the largest of six garbage cities in Cairo, whole families work at recycling and thousands of workshops produce everything from plastic mats to shoe heels and clothes hangers.
Chaos
But the zabbaleen couldn't keep up with population growth. So in 2003, the Mubarak government, as part of a failed bid to host the soccer World Cup, contracted international companies to take up garbage collection. But it threw the system into chaos.
The companies worked with Dumpsters, but Cairenes didn't use them, having grown used to the zabbaleen coming to their doorstep. Many resented paying both the companies and the zabbaleen. And the zabbaleen resented being squeezed out by the companies. Fights broke out over collecting schedules and routes. Many dumpsters disappeared.
Then came the swine flu panic of 2009. Deprived of their pigs, the zabbaleen no longer had any interest in collecting organic waste.
The end result: the government waste department can't cope, the companies don't have dumpsters or the zabbaleen don't come through. So on any given day—or stretch of days— a given neighborhood becomes a “no-man's land” of garbage.
The zabbaleen still collect about 8,000 tons—more than half the daily output—and the companies about 3,000, leaving much of the remaining 6,000 tons on the streets, a lot dumped in the canals and some in the Nile River that flows through the capital.