The Zabbaleen

Ruby - The garbage people take your trash and recycle it to make paper, aprons, big plastic bowls, rugs and many other things. Their name is the Zabbaleen. Zabbaleen means “garbage collector” in Arabic. They reuse plastic, paper, metal, cloth, and many other things. They recycle 80% of the trash they collect – that is amazing!

The Zabbaleen use to be subsistence farmers in Upper Egypt before they moved to Cairo. Subsistence farmer means that they grow just enough food to feed themselves. Upper Egypt is actuality the southern part of Egypt and Lower Egypt is the northern part of Egypt.  Mostly they are Coptic Christians, a religious minority in Egypt, a country that is 90% Muslim. They live in Moqattum Village on the fringe of Cairo. 

In the 1970’s they built 3 churches in the caves in Moqattum, the surrounding mountain. The largest church holds up to 20,000 people and has carvings that show stories from the bible.  They also have some cool mosaics. 

Staircase from the churches to a view of garbage city. 

Ruby - they keep their animals on the roof tops. 

Katie - The Zabbaleen used pigs to eat the organic matter in the trash and then recycle the rest of it - a very efficient system.  In 2009, in response to the threat of swine flu – the government killed all the pigs making life even harder for the Zabbaleen. Not only did they lose the ability to get rid of organic waste, they lost the income that came from selling the pigs when grown. 

Everyone works in garbage city - even the children. They use these carts to transport the garbage from nearby homes to garbage city. 

They take the plastic and cut it into smaller pieces and recycle it.      

Ruby’s impressions:

• -       Lots of garbage, as you would expect from a place called garbage city
• -       Lots of people saying hello
• -       Lots of people saying “hello, how are you and welcome to Egypt,” probably the only words they know in English.
• -       This is one of the few places in Egypt where no one tries selling you anything
• -       Some ladies wore very pretty dresses, but most wore tattered, dirty clothes.

Paul's impressions:

• Kids grow up fast here.

Katie’s impressions:

• Lots of smiling faces - like the rest of Egypt
• Lots of kids wanting to shake hands with us and some wanted to touch Ruby
•  We will never look at trash the same

Two buddies pleased to have their picture taken

Ruby looking 14

Ruby - They have an organization called Association for the Protection of the Environment  (APE). APE helps the garbage people,  especially the women and children. The APE has a shop where they sell extraordinary hand made paper made from trash. They also make rugs from recycled rags.

Giant bags of rubbish gathered front he streets of Cairo are brought here and sorted by women and children. They sort it all by hand - piece by piece.

We went to a family’s house to have tea and see their solar panel made from recycled scraps of metal. The solar power panels made from recycled material cost 3,000 Egyptian pounds (LE) or about $500.00.  They also made a biogas machine to make methane fuel to make fire for cooking.  2kg waste = 2 hours of fire in the biogas machine. They hope their ideas spread to others in garbage city. 

The biogas machine

On the right the solar panel from China, on the left the one made from recycled materials in garbage city. 

The Zabbaleen suffer greatly from anemia, trachoma, and hepatitis C. A young woman we met is trying to help this problem through education. 

You can google Zabbaleen to learn more about them. And you can watch a movie called Garbage Dreams. The Zabbaleen are the face of garbage.