Garbage City

On the outskirts of the Mokattam Mountain only 20 minutes from downtown Cairo, Egypt lies the neighborhood of Manshiyat Naser, also known as Garbage City. Home to the Zabaleen (literally translated as garbage people in Egyptian Arabic), a settlement of more than 80,000 mostly Coptic Christian people. Some of Egypt’s poorest inhabitants live with a lack of basic infrastructure and are surrounded by the garbage they collect. They have been historically disenfranchised and often misjudged. Recent government decisions (outsourcing to multinationals) and a swine flu epidemic have done very little to uplift their situations.

For over 70 years, the Zabaleen have filled a gap left by the city of Cairo which never established an efficient garbage collecting system. The residents collect, sort through, and recycle the city’s discarded items creating an economy out of garbage. The Zabaleen have developed an efficient system that allows them to survive and profit from this work. Everyone in the family works together with the men typically leaving early in the morning to collect garbage and the women and children sitting at home in between piles of trash dividing and sorting the usable from the unusable: towers in front of buildings, piles in front rooms, and stacks upon stacks on rooftops.

Recycling and reusing up 80% of the city's waste; more than four times that of what most western recycling companies can produce. Their methods include using pigs and other livestock to clear the garbage of organic waste. The pigs are later sold to neighboring hotels and resorts that cater to non-muslim guests. These systems are so efficient that they are being studied as a pathway to zero waste for the rest of us.

Located in the heart of Manshiyat Naser is St. Simon the Tanner monastery. Built into the cliffside is the Cave Church, established in1975, it overlooks Garbage City. Seating over 15,000 the church predominately services the Zabaleen community and it's the largest church in the Middle East... also a great vantage point for taking some of the shots on our Egypt page.