Muslim Common Sense

Posted in NEWSMAX.COM
Cairo Awash in Garbage — Blame the Flu
Imagine a metropolis of 18 million people that produces more than 8,000 tons of garbage each day — yet has no municipal garbage collection.
That’s Cairo. Garbage has long been an unhealthy and odiferous problem in the Egyptian capital, but in the last few years it has gotten even worse, thanks in large part to the swine flu.
And while Cairo residents have lately been far more concerned with the unfolding political turmoil in Egypt than with garbage, the problem has been just one more facet of Egyptian life that angers and frustrates citizens.
For decades, Cairo’s garbage has been picked up by a Coptic Christian community called the Zabbaleen — “garbage people” in Egyptian Arabic — who moved from farms to Cairo in the 1940s looking for work and settled on cliffs on the eastern edge of the city.
The Zabbaleen — whose numbers have been estimated from 80,000 to several hundred thousand — go door to door collecting trash from city residents and businesses. They transport the garbage back to their communities and sort out materials that can be sold for recycling.
Several years ago the government tried to hire private companies to collect some of the trash, but the Zabbaleen said they were collecting more than 6,000 tons a day and the private carters just 2,000, according to The New York Times.
In the past the Zabbaleen tossed the food waste to their large herds of pigs, which they raised for sale and subsidence. But in April 2009, news broke that swine flu was spreading around the world. The government of Hosni Mubarak decided to kill all the country’s pigs, about 300,000, even though there had been no cases of swine flu in Egypt at that time. The slaughter continued even after it was generally agreed that pigs were not spreading the disease.
The vast majority of Egyptians are Muslim and they do not eat pork.
Without their pigs, the Zabbaleen suddenly had no way to dispose of their organic waste. Instead they have been recycling what they can from the garbage they collect, and tossing the food waste wherever they can.
“They expect me to pay to have a carter take this [garbage] away,” said one member of a Zabbaleen family who lost 125 pigs. “Forget it. I will throw it anywhere.”
The private companies have tried to place trash bins around the city, “but they failed to understand the ethos of the community,” the Seattle Times reported shortly after the pig slaughter. “People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to someone collecting it from the door.”