What a waste and pictures, pictures, pictures!

Posted by Jordan Reiter on December 28 2007 at 6:16 p.m.

Some people have asked me to post about my experiences this past Friday, so in true form I'm doing it several days late.

If you visit Cairo, one thing that's going to jump up at you is that clearly Egyptians have a different relationship with trash than people in the West do. They often don't put stuff in the trash, and when they do, it's everything. You won't see a single recycling bin anywhere in Cairo (Okay, okay, you will: in Al Azhar Park there are bins divided up for recycling. I have no idea how these are collected, since there is no other place in Cairo that does recycling. My guess is that since href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Azhar_Park">Al Azhar park was designed as a sort-of international effort. No doubt one of the line items was for the bins to be separated into separate items. I can't imagine that most Egyptians know what to do with them, and you'll probably find waste of each kind in all of the bins).

To add insult to injury, every time you buy something, no matter how small, it is placed in a bag. And these bags are then thrown in the trash!

I've always recycled glass and metal and for some reason it always bugged me the most when I put perfectly good glass jars or nice metal or aluminum cans into the trash.

So, on the surface, it seems like Cairenes waste a lot of supplies, especially when you see so many things put in bags. And to make matters worse, all of this, along with everything else, gets thrown in the trash.

However, this is really only the surface. For one thing, for every bag that might be used here, there are loads and loads of packaging being used in the States. Nearly everything in Egypt is sold by the pound, which means no packaging and no labels. Unofficial recycling is also rampant here. Thrift encourages poor Egyptians -- in other words, most Egyptians -- to use items until they absolutely fall apart (and even then, they will usually just tie whatever it is together, until that falls apart). Bottles routinely get used and reused. No one buys sport bottles--they all just use old water bottles. Items get used in new and inventive ways. Necessity is the mother of invention, and here necessity is great indeed.

And on the other side, recycling is most definitely happening, although it's largely invisible.

Let's say, for example, that you go to a store, buy a cup of yogurt, eat it, then chuck the container in the trash. This is where it ends up:href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_jS8lx3jkNg8/R3GEIgF4szI/AAAAAAAAAKE/Fxy8U4saZdU/s1600-h/7BKB0220.jpg">src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_jS8lx3jkNg8/R3GEIgF4szI/AAAAAAAAAKE/Fxy8U4saZdU/s400/7BKB0220.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" />
The pictures here aren't very clear; through lack of foresight I failed to bring my camera, and had to take all my photos using the really lousy quality of my cellphone
This is a bag filled with single serving brand name yogurt containers and only single serving brand name yogurt containers (and thus, the exact same kind of plastic). What has happened is that the trash has been collected by the Zabaleen (literally, um, the garbage people) who live and work in an area of Cairo known as href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_City">Garbage City, and has been sorted by type and color to be recycled and reused.

The story I heard is this: a while back, a group of Coptic Christians moved to that part of the city. They raised pigs, so they gathered garbage and scraps and fed them to the pigs. Then, as the trash got more sophisticated, so did they, finding new and original ways to reuse the refuse. And thus their source of livelihood.

If you arrive in Garbage City the way I did -- down from the href="http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tanner.htm">Coptic church carved into the mountain, this story seems to hold true, because the first thing you will see on your right, down in a courtyard, is a whole mess of pigs dining on -- well -- garbage. Oranges are in season now, so it looks like half of what they're eating is orange rinds. I imagine that's got to affect the taste of the meat. So I guess in Cairo the flavor of pork changes with the season. Not sure what pigs eat in the spring or summer.

I was visiting Garbage City with my friend Samir, and as we turned that's when I saw the plastic containers. In fact, there were hundreds of bags of plastics, separated out by type and color (including an entire container of purple plastics -- you'd never see that bin at your local recycling center). If I'd had a better camera I would have tried to capture them all but as it was I figured there'd be no point.

This is what a street in Garbage City looks like:
href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_jS8lx3jkNg8/R3GSTQF4s0I/AAAAAAAAAKM/rMpirU34lpQ/s1600-h/garbagecity.jpg">src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_jS8lx3jkNg8/R3GSTQF4s0I/AAAAAAAAAKM/rMpirU34lpQ/s400/garbagecity.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" />

Original Post: http://wanderingjordan.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-waste-and-pictures-pictures.html

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