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How to Solve Cairo’s Massive Waste Problem

February 15, 2019
A young child sits in a pile of trash on the streets of Moqqatam, a suburb of Cairo which is home to a people known as the Zabaleen, which means, plainly enough, “the garbage collectors”. They are said to be the world’s greatest recyclers yet the Zabaleen also live in extreme urban squalor. Credit: Peter Dench

Cairo has a waste problem that is too big for its public funding agencies and the Zabbaleen waste pickers to solve by themselves. It is one of the largest cities in the world of over 17 million inhabitants, producing more than 15,000 tons of waste every day. According to the World Bank, only 60% of all trash is properly collected, leading to a 0.4 – 0.6% loss of gross domestic product (GDP) to the Egyptian economy as a result. A combination of private, public and informal (Zabbaleen) collection techniques has not been able to keep up with the growth of municipal waste, and as a result, the city is facing an environmental, health, safety, and economic crisis that cannot be resolved through this current approach. Of course, environmental waste is not the greatest problem facing the Egyptian people, with 28% of the total population living in poverty, and a large percentage of those living in Cairo. Why should the Egyptian people focus on a waste problem when such a large percentage of the population does not have enough resources for adequate food and water? It might surprise you that a…


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