Zabaleen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Zabaleen (Egyptian Arabic: زبالين "garbage people") are an Egyptian community of mainly Coptic Christians ^{[verification needed]} who are employed in the city of Cairo to collect and dispose of much of the city's waste. The Zabaleen in Cairo (an estimated 60,000 - 70,000 in number) are mostly descendants of poor farmers from upper Egypt who settled in the city in the 1950s. For the past 5 decades they have played an important role in the collection of waste from the higher-income parts of the city, hauling away waste by donkey carts or small trucks.

The Zabaleen generally perform this service very cheaply or for free, making a living by sorting the waste materials for reuse or recycling. Waste food is fed to livestock (most often pigs) or poultry. Other materials, such as steel, glass and plastic bottles, are sorted by hand and sold as raw materials. Other items are repaired or reused. Some material is burnt as fuel. The Zabaleen collect and process about one-third of Cairo's trash (4,500 tonnes a day) [1].

The Zabaleen are able to recycle or reuse up to 85% of the rubbish they collect (a figure comparable to the best modern recycling operations in Western countries) [2]. The necessity to sort waste by hand and to derive an income solely from the waste material means that the Zabaleen developed a very effective method of recycling waste products. Many Zabaleen suffer from health problems such as hepatitis, due to the low-tech sorting methods used and general poverty.

Municipal authorities in Egypt have tried for several years to replace the Zabaleen with modern waste collection and disposal methods, primarily employing large foreign companies. This process has attracted controversy in the area, with many residents objecting to higher fees for the modern disposal service. The modern collection service has also been critised for being unable to recycle as much of the waste material as the Zabaleen.