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.....