Meetings with the EEAA, the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency and the giza Cleaning & Beautification Authority, seem to be bringing positive results. We have agreed in principal to start a "sorting at souce" pilot project, in a suburb of Cairo. A group of residents will be asked to form their own Residents' Association for Sorting at Source (RASS) and educated on how to separate household garbage into wet, dry, bottles, paper and grease (vegetable oil and fat). This will be collected by independent garbage collectors and brought by nonmotorised means (probably tricycle rickshaw since there is a law against using donkeys - yes, truly) to a local Resource & Energy Recovery Centre where the separated organic waste will be converted to high grade fertiliser using compost worms, the used waste household grease will be converted to biodiesel to power the bigger vehicles which will be used to take the separated dry garbage to local recycling factories. Sounds good in theory, right? The practical application will probably be entirely different. It is intended that all participants have a share of generated profits, ie the RASS and the garbage collectors. The infrastructure eg rickshaws, building, equipment etc will be provided on a no-interest bearing (ie inflation rate only) loan.
Meanwhile, I am still aiming for a meeting with the Minister of Environment in order to propose some small changes to traffic in Cairo, like introducing pedestrian zones where it is now next to impossible for cars to enter (even though they do their best to do so!), bicycle taxis a la Munich and other cities, transit lanes and increased use of public transport on the Nile. Not a lot, perhaps something which will help the congestion in and around Cairo. We took an hour to go 3 kilometres last week - why, who knows. I wanted to walk the distance however there is no footpath.....and 35000 people are injured in Cairo every year due to traffic accidents.
The Agricultural Research Centre has agreed to provide space to set up a worm farm in order to build up stocks of compost worms to convert the organic waste to high grade fertiliser....the only problem at the moment is obtaining the starter batch of worms. Bringing a kilo or two back from our next trip to Australia might be one solution....soil issues aside.
The Agricultural Engineering Research Institute has agreed build the compost reactor which is necessary to predigest the organic waste for feeding to the worms. These two processes together, that is, anaerobic digestion of the organic waste for 7 days, and six weeks feeding to the worms, reduce the original waste by 2 thirds. What currently happens is the organic waste ends up in landfill....effectively losing a high quality non-chemical N-P-K neutral fertiliser to be used in arid agicultural soils.
The AERI is also building the small scale biodiesel reactor and has agreed to train the local garbage collectors in operating the reactor.
IKEA in Egypt, which operates as a trading office sourcing products and working with suppliers to manufacture existing products in an enviromentally aware manner, has agreed to request its product manufacturers to use biodiesel in factory forklifts, thereby creating an immediate market for the biodiesel which is not used to power the local garbage collection trucks.
Vodafone Egypt is also interested in using biodiesel for those of its diesel base stations which have not yet been converted to solar energy.
A new low-income housing project created on the Western side of Cairo by a private organisation is also aiming for zero household waste. They are interested in the compost digester/worm farm to produce fertiliser which they can use on small agricultural plots for producing fruit and vegetables for the low cost housing project community.
The Green Roofs project has attracted interest from Vodafone Egypt. Hopefully this will also be of interest to the low cost housing project, as it represents substantial energy cost savings by greening roofs. Alternatively painting the roof white at least reflects heat and reduces energy costs for cooling.
Meanwhile, the massive burning of rice wastes might slow this year if we are able to put in place a small-scale ethanol production plant, which will provide ethanol for the biodiesel production, as well as alternative fuel sources for rice farmers producing the rice wastes. Equally, worms could be of use here, however the sheer quantities ( 6 million tonnes of rice waste) mean that this year at least, ethanol is a better use of the waste than worms, because we simply won't have the volume of compost worms necessary to process the waste into fertiliser. One further project which will take at least another year is also now located with the local IKEA office: I took them some rice waste furniture and it seems to be an interesting addition to the product range. Now it has to go through the entire IKEA verification process, which includes ascertaining that children are not involved in production and that the furniture does not contain harmful substances. This will generate substantial employment opportunities if IKEA does decide to source the rice waste furniture here. Fingers crossed.
That's about it for now....stay tuned.
Thursday, 13 March 2008
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
getting started
We have been in Cairo 6 weeks and it has taken most of that time to figure out how I really want to use my time here.
We wanted to set up a self-sustaining community project but the magnitude of the waste management problem here in Cairo impressed me so profoundly that I found myself unable to move away from this theme.
The first place to start was trying to understand how, in a nation of inherent recyclers, so much waste was left lying around both within the city limits and along the major highways out of Cairo. The description below, although lengthy, is actually rather potted, so to any of the participants reading the Clean Up Egypt blog who feel this is an inadequate description, my apologies.
Pre-2003 there was a fairly stable situation. Garbage in the city was collected informally, transported to an area to the east of Cairo, and sorted in the homes of collectors. Gloves and overalls weren't part of their equipment so diseases such as hepatitis were fairly rife. A few NGOs worked to tackle this problem and have had, in the interim, some success in this area. However, the sheer acceleration of growth that Cairo has experienced in the last few decades meant that this system, while achieving recycling rates in excess of 60%, was having trouble managing the volumes of waste being generated. Whole areas of Cairo, considered lean in terms of pickings by the garbage collectors, had to depend on an inadequate municipal infrastructure.
Enter, unfortunately, some enterprising local and foreign waste management companies who "consulted" to the government and governorates, using the success that one of these firms had enjoyed in Alexandria, a city of considerably smaller proportions, to suggest the "best" means to solve the problem. The result was the implementation of a strategy which generated 224 million LE in annual contracts for the foreign companies to process around 10 000 tonnes of garbage daily. The contracts were signed for 15 years and the minimum amount of waste to be recycled was set at 20% per year. As for the rest, the very large holes in the desert surrounding Cairo were to do very well for dumping the remaining 80% municipal, industrial, medical and hazardous waste. The companies, hoping to cash in on the lack of legislation in Egypt which has been enacted in Europe limiting landfill to a maximum 10% of total wastes generated annually, naturally adopted the now defunct business model previosly used in Europe, which has been that of collecting landfill and transport fees from the producer of garbage, and recycling a very small percentage of easily sorted and cleaned waste items.
Post 2003 the situation has gone from needing improvement to calamitous in mountainous proportions. The companies have been accused of not fulfilling the contract terms and fined by the governorates. Their response has been to stop collecting garbage. The outlawed independent and informal garbage collectors, who were completely by-passed in the whole process of "waste management modernisation", began sneaking back into Cairo to start collecting. There is money to be made in recycling; it is how it is done that generates either a profit or a loss, and in a country of several milion unemployed, one person riding a donkey cart from door-to-door to collect garbage can make a living recycling the collected garbage where a huge waste truck dumping the garbage in landfill just adds to pollution, traffic congestion, and loss of carbon energy.
Whereas once individuals, constrained either financially or through lack of materials, either reused or recycled their garbage, and hence retained ownership of their waste, with the advent of throw-away materials and the imposition of a centrally "managed" system, all but the poorest, or those with the existing knowledge and expertise to recover energy and value from waste, are now divorced from ownership and responsibility of their own waste. The level of awareness of how to reuse, reduce, recycle and recover value from waste is next to nothing, if not generally misinformed.
35 years ago an Australian started a campaign to clean up Sydney Harbour. That has grown in the not-for-profit organisation Clean Up Australia and thus into Clean Up the World. As a child I grew up bombarded with slogans "please, keep my world clean" and what we may not have learnt in terms of recycling, we certainly absorbed in terms of not littering. It was these memories which encouraged me to find out more about the "lone hero" of my childhood and discover the global organisation his efforts have since engendered. It seemed the logical next step to establish Clean Up Egypt and affiliate the local chapter with Clean Up the World.
In the next instalment, how the network has been developing.....
We wanted to set up a self-sustaining community project but the magnitude of the waste management problem here in Cairo impressed me so profoundly that I found myself unable to move away from this theme.
The first place to start was trying to understand how, in a nation of inherent recyclers, so much waste was left lying around both within the city limits and along the major highways out of Cairo. The description below, although lengthy, is actually rather potted, so to any of the participants reading the Clean Up Egypt blog who feel this is an inadequate description, my apologies.
Pre-2003 there was a fairly stable situation. Garbage in the city was collected informally, transported to an area to the east of Cairo, and sorted in the homes of collectors. Gloves and overalls weren't part of their equipment so diseases such as hepatitis were fairly rife. A few NGOs worked to tackle this problem and have had, in the interim, some success in this area. However, the sheer acceleration of growth that Cairo has experienced in the last few decades meant that this system, while achieving recycling rates in excess of 60%, was having trouble managing the volumes of waste being generated. Whole areas of Cairo, considered lean in terms of pickings by the garbage collectors, had to depend on an inadequate municipal infrastructure.
Enter, unfortunately, some enterprising local and foreign waste management companies who "consulted" to the government and governorates, using the success that one of these firms had enjoyed in Alexandria, a city of considerably smaller proportions, to suggest the "best" means to solve the problem. The result was the implementation of a strategy which generated 224 million LE in annual contracts for the foreign companies to process around 10 000 tonnes of garbage daily. The contracts were signed for 15 years and the minimum amount of waste to be recycled was set at 20% per year. As for the rest, the very large holes in the desert surrounding Cairo were to do very well for dumping the remaining 80% municipal, industrial, medical and hazardous waste. The companies, hoping to cash in on the lack of legislation in Egypt which has been enacted in Europe limiting landfill to a maximum 10% of total wastes generated annually, naturally adopted the now defunct business model previosly used in Europe, which has been that of collecting landfill and transport fees from the producer of garbage, and recycling a very small percentage of easily sorted and cleaned waste items.
Post 2003 the situation has gone from needing improvement to calamitous in mountainous proportions. The companies have been accused of not fulfilling the contract terms and fined by the governorates. Their response has been to stop collecting garbage. The outlawed independent and informal garbage collectors, who were completely by-passed in the whole process of "waste management modernisation", began sneaking back into Cairo to start collecting. There is money to be made in recycling; it is how it is done that generates either a profit or a loss, and in a country of several milion unemployed, one person riding a donkey cart from door-to-door to collect garbage can make a living recycling the collected garbage where a huge waste truck dumping the garbage in landfill just adds to pollution, traffic congestion, and loss of carbon energy.
Whereas once individuals, constrained either financially or through lack of materials, either reused or recycled their garbage, and hence retained ownership of their waste, with the advent of throw-away materials and the imposition of a centrally "managed" system, all but the poorest, or those with the existing knowledge and expertise to recover energy and value from waste, are now divorced from ownership and responsibility of their own waste. The level of awareness of how to reuse, reduce, recycle and recover value from waste is next to nothing, if not generally misinformed.
35 years ago an Australian started a campaign to clean up Sydney Harbour. That has grown in the not-for-profit organisation Clean Up Australia and thus into Clean Up the World. As a child I grew up bombarded with slogans "please, keep my world clean" and what we may not have learnt in terms of recycling, we certainly absorbed in terms of not littering. It was these memories which encouraged me to find out more about the "lone hero" of my childhood and discover the global organisation his efforts have since engendered. It seemed the logical next step to establish Clean Up Egypt and affiliate the local chapter with Clean Up the World.
In the next instalment, how the network has been developing.....
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