Zabbaleen

The Zabbaleen (Egyptian Arabic: زبالين Zabbalīn, IPA: [zæbbæˈliːn]) is a word which literally means "garbage people" in Egyptian Arabic. The contemporary use of the word in Egyptian Arabic is to mean "garbage collectors". In cultural contexts, the word refers to teenagers and adults who have served as Cairo's informal garbage collectors since approximately the 1940s. The Zabbaleen (singular: زبال Zabbāl, [zæbˈbæːl]) are also known as Zarraba (singular: Zarrab), which means "pig-pen operators." The word Zabbalīn came from the Egyptian Arabic word zebāla ([zeˈbæːlæ], زبالة) which means "garbage".

Spread out among seven different settlements scattered in the Greater Cairo Urban Region, the Zabbaleen population is between 50,000 and 70,000. The largest settlement is Mokattam village, nicknamed "Garbage City," located at the foot of the Mokattam Plateau, next to Manshiyat Nasser. The Zabbaleen community has a population of around 20,000 to 30,000, over 90 percent of which are poor Coptic Christians living in self-built homes, many in slum conditions.

For several generations, the Zabbaleen supported themselves by collecting trash door-to-door from the residents of Cairo for nearly no charge. Notably, the Zabbaleen recycle up to 80 percent of the waste that they collect via local Egyptian companies, whereas most Western garbage collecting companies can only recycle 20 to 25 percent of the waste that they collect.

The Zabbaleen use donkey-pulled carts and pickup trucks to transport the garbage that they collect from the residents of Cairo, transport the garbage to their homes in Mokattam Village, sort the garbage there, and then sell the sorted garbage to middlemen or create new materials from their recycled garbage. The living situation for the Zabbaleen is poor, especially since they live amongst the trash that they sort in their village and with the pigs to which they feed their organic waste. Nevertheless, the Zabbaleen have formed a strong and tight-knit community. However, their way of life has come under threat after the Cairo municipal authorities’ decision in 2003 to award annual contracts of $50 million to three multinational garbage disposal companies.

The government authorities do not compensate the Zabbaleen for these changes, and as a result, the takeover of waste collection threatens the socio-economic sustainability of the Zabbaleen community. The Zabbaleen faced another challenge when the Egyptian Agricultural Ministry ordered the culling of all pigs in April 2009, in response to national fears over the possible spread of H1N1 influenza.

This governmental decision poses a major setback to the Zabbaleen because pigs are an essential component to their recycling and sorting system, in which the pigs eat all of the organic waste. Immediately after the culling of pigs, observers noticed a visible increase of trash piles and piles of rotting food on the streets of Cairo. There are also worries that the Egyptian government is seeking to remove the Mokattam village entirely and relocate the Zabbaleen further outside of Cairo by a further 25 km, to a 50-feddan (51.9-acre) plot in Cairo's eastern desert settlement of Katameya.