CAIRO: For the past two years, talk of the Egyptian economy being relatively shielded from the effects of the global economy crisis has been common among government officials, academia and the media.
This rhetoric is, however, rarely uttered in communities like Manshiyet Nasser, home to Cairo’s zabaleen (garbage collectors) community. This is where much of the city’s garbage is collected to be sifted, sorted, processed and then sold as recycled material to factories and business across the country
Residents of the area say they have been hit hard by the global economic crisis that started in 2008.
“Many of the people here took their children out of school or couldn’t pay for weddings to get married because there is no money. Whatever comes is just enough to provide for basic needs,” said Amal Nabil Abdallah, head of a local NGO that works in the area.
“Manshiyet Nasser was definitely affected, [and] I’m sure other similar places like Ezbat Al-Nakhl, Torah, Kattameya and Ard El-Lewa were also affected,” she added.
Abdallah is the head of a five-year garbage segregation campaign for her local NGO, the Spirit of Youth Association, which advocates for the zabaleen community, particularly regarding their integration into the formal sector of Cairo’s solid waste management.
The campaign aims to obtain official licenses for garbage collectors in the area so they can be sub-contracted by multinational companies, in an effort to improve the incomes of the community’s residents.
Abdallah pointed to three main factors impacting the community: first, the lower prices of materials due to the financial crisis; second, the new law requiring garbage to be sorted at the source instead of allowing collectors to carry it in bulk back to the village; and finally, the slaughtering of around 300,000 pigs in the country as a precautionary measure against last year’s swine flu outbreak.
“Before the crisis, people here were living like pashas,” said Fayez Antar, a Manshiyet Nasser resident and owner of a plastic processing machine.
Like many other garbage collectors, Antar invested in machines to process the garbage, which generated incomes that were high enough to invest in more machinery while the recycling and reprocessing industry was thriving.
Prior to the crisis, he could buy a ton of plastic from garbage collectors for around LE 500 and then resell it after processing for LE 1,700 — a very competitive price, he said.
In order to compete now, however, as the market price of materials decreases “due to lower demand and a fall in international prices, the price of processed plastic went down to LE 500, which does not cover processing costs, including electricity and manpower.
|I have stopped running the machine completely,” Antar said. “I am an agricultural engineer, but in reality I do not have any other business to take its place, and this is the same for everyone here, garbage collecting is all we know.”
Marzooka Wanis, a secretary at the Association for Protection of the Environment (APE), moved two of her three children from private to public schools as a result of the family’s decreasing income.
Wanis was previously able to afford the private school annual tuition of around LE 6,000 because her husband was doing well with his garbage collection, and, coupled with her secretary work, the money was sufficient.
Wanis’ husband, however, only makes half of what he used to.
With the lower prices of materials, the zabaleen community’s only advantage is their ability to diversify their sources of income through the types of garbage they collect and sell. According to her, this is not possible anymore.
“Transporting all the garbage as a bulk justified the cost of transportation, but relying only on one or two materials does not cover the costs anymore,” Wanis said.
Both Wanis and Antar agreed that the decision to slaughter the pigs also had a devastating effect since it provided the residents of the area with a much-needed secondary income and took care of the biological waste. They said that due to all these developments people in the area are now making a third of what they used to.
Even Wanis’s salary, the only stable income for their family, is at stake as APE — an NGO which relies heavily on sales of paper, garments, textiles and accessories made of recycled cloth — has been struggling. The association buys large amounts of material from the garbage collectors who are also affected indirectly.
“Our shops are not selling, and people are definitely not buying,” said Magda Gad, head of APE. “Before the crisis, we sold merchandise worth LE 15,000 in a bazaar event, for example, but this year we only sold [products worth] LE 1,800.”
“Most of our regular customers, including bookshops, libraries and hotels are not buying from us or buying much less,” she added.
Gad said that with the rise in prices of sugar and other basic foods, she recognizes the need to increase employees’ salaries, but the current environment makes it difficult to do so.
“Our income is barely enough to pay electricity and water bills and all funds that come from donors and sponsors don’t go to wages and salaries but to the projects themselves,” she said.
“The government even makes us pay for garbage collection fees, which were added to our electricity bills,” Wanis said, “With all these changes, it’s no wonder the streets aren’t clean.”
