Clean Up Egypt

Celebrate Earth Day

2008-04-22T07:10:00.002+02:00

The 5Rs of Rubbish:
responsibly
reduce, reuse, recycle & recover

How can you reduce your energy consumption, your waste production, and help the environment? Here is a list of simple things you can do, starting today:

Walk up and down the stairs every day;
Cut 1 minute of your shower time every day until you shower for a maximum of 5 minutes, and reward yourself with a long relaxing bath once a week once you have reached this goal;
Wet your toothbrush, cloth or shaving brush/razor and turn the tap water OFF while you shave, wash or clean your teeth. Rinse using a cup of water;
Make sure all electrical appliances are unplugged when not in use;
Take your own shopping bag(s), whether it be cloth, paper or from recycled material, when you go shopping, and leave spare bags in the car and one in your handbag;
Say “NO” to plastic bags when someone automatically starts to put your purchases in a plastic bag. Ask for a recycled paper bag, and better still, carry a spare with you all the time;
Money talks – tell your suppliers to adopt more energy efficient and environmentally friendly technologies. If they need help to do this, suggest they contact Clean Up Egypt. A great example of how this has been implemented is IKEA, who not only practice what they preach, but enforce the same behaviour from their suppliers, with particular emphasis on ensuring children are not being used in production and waste materials are not dumped;
Walk once a week to an appointment you have, whether it be a lunch date, a visit to the hair-dresser, or to the office. A good walking speed is 10 minutes per kilometre, so in half an hour you will already have walked 3 km (see www.cairowalkinggroup.com or email muhammadfarag @gmail.com to join);
Are you a two car household or a one car household? Try one week using just one car;
Buy fresh food which is not pre-packaged, and buy in bulk – fill small containers with the serving size required at home eg instead of individual 100g yoghurt tubs buy 1kg and divide as needed;
Keep a water bottle (like cyclists use) for picnics, in the car, in your bag, in the children's school bags, and say “NO” to bottled water. Use a filter on your water tap, and fill your water bottles before you step out;
Cook at home once a week using a solar cooker – ask if you would like a demonstration on how to make and use your own, or where you can purchase these;
Use candles for gentle lighting at night – scented candles of tea tree, citronella and geranium are particularly effective against mosquitos. Ask if you would like to know where you can purchase these or how to make your own;
Keep your air-conditioning set to a minimum of 26 degrees celsius and use light colours to reflect heat. You won't notice such a difference when going outside on hot days, and you will acclimatise more easily;
Park your car in a shady spot and turn the engine OFF if you have to wait in the car – leave the battery on if you want to use the fan or air conditioner;
Grow your own food – it tastes better, is delivered fresh to your own doorstep and you can use all kinds of different containers, such as 1kg yoghurt tubs, tetrapaks, plastic bottles to hold your plants;
Cook at home and limit take-outs and home-deliveries to once a week, then once a fortnight, then once a month.....;
Avoid meat for at least one day a week – it takes 10kg of edible grain to produce 1kg of meat, and ruminant animals produce large quantities of methane, which is 20 times worse in its effect on the atmosphere than C02;
Take up a craft such as knitting or crocheting recycled plastic bags into a duffle bag, sandals, place mats, shower curtains – if this isn't your style, donate your clean plastic bags to people who are recycling plastic this way;
Once a month, offer to plant (and do so) a mulberry tree in each school within walking distance of your home or office;
Separate your garbage according to the sorting tips provided, and make sure your waste is being appropriately managed by your waste collector ie being reused, recycled or having its energy recovered eg waste oil converted to biodiesel, and not ending up as landfill;
Aim to implement at least one of the tips on this page each week so that these become part of your normal routine.

worms worms worms

2008-04-22T03:55:00.004+02:00

Amid quite a bit of fan-fare and no little amount of paper shuffling, the compost worms arrived about 3 weeks ago to begin their job of munching their way through vast quantities of organic waste, and reproducing ad infinitum....hopefully. This project would have been in no way possible without efforts on both the Australian side and the Egyptian end, particularly the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation. Contrary to the popular opinion that working with government results in going nowhere fast, the clearance papers were drummed up in less than 2 days, when the Australian Quarantine people requested more than my verbal declaration that "it was all organised in Egypt, no problem" to export the worms, and in less than 2 days of arrival the worms had cleared Egyptian quarantine, albeit with over one hundred signatures accompanying their release!

It might however, have been better, if the worms had not made it quite so quickly out of quarantine....The first evening the worm bed was attacked by a pack of dogs, so on arrival in the morning there were large quantities of dried out worms dispersed dead or dying in the pit that had been constructed. We rescued the remaining worms and built them the equivalent of a brick barbecue about a metre high, 1 wide and about 2 metres long, covered during daylight hours with recycled white foam trays, and during the evening with an old cast-iron piece of fencing that needed four people to shift.

The iron grid proved sufficient to keep the dogs at bay, however meant that at least 4 people had to be about every morning to check on the worms. So after a week of heaving iron, an less heavy 2-person dark green cover was located. Very good in theory, until the day that nobody checked on the worms and the temperatures hit 35 degrees. As luck would have it, I had also put in a sprinkling of lovely new rabbit droppings the night before. The ammonia sky-rocketed, the worms dived, and the top surface layers of the bed were hot enough to cook an egg.....needless to say that meant a few more worms expired. A lesson in the dynamics of solar energy!

Happily, yesterday we achieved our first bed separation - the worm numbers have outgrown their original bed so we created three new beds and 3 breeding beds. The only problem is the breeding beds are only 10cm high, and tomorrow's temperatures are expected to top 40 degrees! Looks like I won't be staying that long at the Earth Day event....

Earth Day here in Egypt is sponsored by CSA who kindly have agreed to a display of worms and a demonstration on how to green your roof and produce your own food, using recycled material to create a rooftop or balcony garden. Naturally, worm castings and worm tea form the basis for the plants' food.

We have also included some 20 odd tips for how to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover energy from household waste, for visitors to the Earth Day Event to take home and place somewhere prominent in their dwellings.

The EEAA proposal is still just that - a proposal. It seems we need at least two agencies to sit together, and trying to get either to first pick up the phone to make the appointment is easier said than done. So efforts have been directed to helping existing community based waste management efforts, by either locating low cost technology for recycling the nasties such as plastic and cigarette butts, in ways which are environmentally friendly and result in more energy output than input to convert, as well as training in worm husbandry!

We are also to begin making expanded clay from ground brown glass, and bricks from plastic. A bone-grinder is due to arrive in the next few weeks in which to crush these materials. GTZ, the Geman arm of technology transfer, funded a project in Argentina on producing plastic bricks, and have agreed to pass on the technology - hopefully soon. We will start experimenting anyway!

Meetings with larger corporations on how to improve energy efficiency and achieve zero waste have been progressing very well. There is a lot of enthusiasm at the corporate level to go "green" especially if it makes economic sense.

Wadi Environmental Sciences Centre, a non profit organisation which runs hands-on science based experiments to help children better understand environmental impacts, is presenting World Environment Day with the British Council, based around 6 topics including Air, Water, Health under the theme "Kick the Habit". Collaboration has been going well, with lots of ideas for hands-on activities during the day being generated.

What can you do with your left-over plastic bags? Here are some ideas:
1. Iron the bags together between two sheets of paper until about 8 layers thick. When you have about 1 metre square of "material" cut a hole for your head and hey presto, a rain poncho.
2. Cut the grips of the plastic bag and open it out into one piece. Fold over and roll into a long tube. Cut 1cm strips from the tube and tie the ends together. Wrap this "twine" around an old toilet paper roll, and knit or crochet into a place mat, carry bag, even sandals.

Who is doing what, where and how...

2008-03-13T08:52:00.003+02:00

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.

getting started

2008-03-04T15:41:00.001+02:00

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.....