{"id":2045,"date":"2014-04-07T17:45:41","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T17:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/?p=2045"},"modified":"2014-04-08T08:03:14","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T08:03:14","slug":"talking-rubbish-with-the-environment-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/2014\/04\/talking-rubbish-with-the-environment-minister.html","title":{"rendered":"Talking “rubbish” with Egypt’s environment minister"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"laila<\/a>Sitting down with Minister of Environment Laila Iskandar at Alexandria\u2019s ongoing Biovision conference, she talked to Nature Middle East about going back to the basics in terms of solid waste sorting and recycling–a thing that was overdue, according to her.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have tried everything else, and all has failed,\u201d she says. Before becoming minister, Iskandar was consultant to the ministry on waste management issues in Egypt, and changing the current disposal system was what she\u2019d been lobbying for ever since the government contracted Spanish, Italian and French waste management companies for rubbish disposal.<\/p>\n

With Egypt\u2019s tight budget, and rampant poverty, one would think that investing in an already-integrated community that does what big waste companies are doing, with lesser costs, instead of outsourcing the operation, is a no-brainer. However, in the minister\u2019s words, the country chose to pool money into a \u201cmodern\u201d management system that was practically set for failure, instead of re-organizing the work of informal garbage collectors–casually known as the \u201czabaleen\u201d–who are already doing this without an extra fee from the government.<\/p>\n

But she\u2019s out to change that. Coordinating with municipalities, she\u2019s bringing the \u201czabaleen,\u201d whose number ranges from 80,000 to 150,000, under the jurisdiction of the ministry–giving them salaries, uniforms and all. The modern companies only moved the garbage from garbage collecting points to disposal facilities, she says, but “the ‘zabaleen’ have an invested interest in the materials because they want to recycle it.”<\/p>\n

The informal garbage collectors usually haul the piles of refuse on donkey-pulled carts across Cairo to the seedbed of their operations, where they live and work, in Manshiyet Nasser, a squalid densely-populated settlement tucked away in Moqattam–at once experiencing the worst that the city has to offer (in terms of infrastructure) and creating a model for what an active strata of the urban poor can still contribute to the community despite living hand-to-mouth.<\/p>\n

Like clockwork, the garbage is sorted by hand, and 80% of the organic waste gathered is reused or recycled, keeping the community\u2019s carbon footprint to a minimum, before \u201csustainability\u201d came into fashion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe [foreign] companies didn\u2019t do a good job and they weren\u2019t regular. They weren\u2019t experts in managing so they fell apart,\u201d she explains, labeling the contracts with multinationals, \u201ca big disaster.\u201d Giza has \u201cdisentangled itself\u201d from these contracts, but Cairo is still caught up in their throes, she says.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s difficult–and extremely costly–to sever delicately-crafted multimillion-dollar contracts with international companies; they\u2019re currently in arbitration. For now, Iskandar says that they\u2019re re-introducing the work of the \u201czabaleen\u201d on a limited scale, to areas not heavily covered by the companies. And let\u2019s face it, for the \u201czabaleen\u201d or rogue garbage collectors, it was business as usual, only now they\u2019re happy to have garnered recognition by the government for a job they inherited from their fathers, and their forefathers, and had been doing for decades. Especially that until last year, it was illegal to employ garbage collectors.<\/p>\n

Iskandar herself seems both sympathetic to their cause and impressed by the efficiency of their recycling operation. In her speech to the delegates of the conference, she described the collectors as the \u201chonest poor,\u201d pointing out to the audience that they\u2019d been facing one blow after another; first the introduction of foreign companies that threatened to throw them out of business and forced them to be clandestine about it, and second, the 2009 culling of their swine population amidst the \u201cpig influenza panic\u201d that Egypt had experienced with the emergence of some H1N1 virus infections.<\/p>\n

The utilization of this vast workforce, while working to better their living conditions, is a win for the ministry. But the over-powered institution still faces difficulties in other areas, especially that its environmental protection guidelines are more “advisory” than compulsory, with very few enforceable laws and a low-stake penalty code for violators. “How bad is the situation?” we asked, referring generally to conservation efforts, industrial pollution issues to name a few of the problems facing the ministry. “Pretty bad,” Iskandar shot back. “But I’m hopeful that things can get better,” she added as an afterthought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sitting down with Minister of Environment Laila Iskandar at Alexandria\u2019s ongoing Biovision conference, she talked to Nature Middle East about going back to the basics in terms of solid waste sorting and recycling\u2013a thing that was overdue, according to her.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37911,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,37,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-policy","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37911"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/houseofwisdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}