Waste Incineration: A Dying Technology - GAIA

individuals are great, and wastepicking is rarely a profitable venture. 122 Too often, policymakers
view the informal recycling sector as an obstacle to their plans, rather than as a resource and a
constituency. This reduces to their ability to plan and implement changes in the waste
management system, because wastepickers are the ones who know the current situation the
best and are thus best able to contribute to its redesign. It is also often environmentally unjust:
those who bear a disproportionate burden of society’s environmental ills should not also be
threatened with a loss of livelihood in order to rectify those ills. The challenge of improving
discards management in the global South is not only to minimize waste, but also to improve
conditions for those who make a living from discards.
The Zabbaleen of Cairo 123
Zero Waste may be a new name, but it is not a new concept. While waste experts in
wealthy countries have been coming to the realization that resource flows through a society
must be circular rather than linear, the poor of the world have long recognized that any waste is
a potentially profitable resource, and have struggled to take advantage of it, for their own sake.
In so doing, a few communities have succeeded in creating successful systems of resource
management that approach the goal of zero waste and simultaneously employ thousands. One
such example is the zabbaleen of Cairo.
A Zabbaleen sorting out papers and cardboards for recycling in Cairo, Egypt. © CID
The zabbaleen are a community from the south of Egypt who migrated to the city and saw
in its trash an economic opportunity. Working with the traditional collectors of paper, they set
up door-to-door collection systems, with each family working its own daily route, to collect
source-separated household discards. As each collector works the same route, he 124 establishes
a working relationship with the families he collects from. These discards are then separated:
recyclable materials are resold at market rates; food scraps are fed to pigs; and the rest is trucked
to a landfill. Although some families pay the zabbaleen for the garbage pickup service, most of
their income comes from the sale of recyclable materials.
44 Waste Incineration: A Dying Technology