Introduction

This chapter takes up several themes and issues closely relevant to this book's central focus on organising waste in cities. A major theme concerns the conflict between Cairo's rubbish collectors’ low-technology approach to solid waste management and disposal by the Zabaleen, and a high-technology approach carried out by large companies employing wage labour. This theme is related to Leonard's study of the Irish community narratives of mobilisation and struggle against state regional waste plans (see Chapter Ten), as the Zabaleen's case study raises such questions as, can a grassroots indigenous system of recycling waste resist being taken over by a supposedly modern large-scale privatised system? What are the possibilities of local–global partnership? Related conflictual issues involve a marginal society versus a mainstream economic efficiency situation, the Zabaleen society with its embedded rural values versus urban large-scale profit-maximising businesses, and poorer lower-class Zabaleen waste collectors versus middle-class demands for regular efficient waste collection and street cleaning. Another theme that is touched on involves the conflicts, actual and potential, between centralising government ministries and various non-governmental organisations (NGOs), local and international, seeking to foster improvements in the Zabaleen economy and society. Given the recent contribution of such NGOs, can they play a positive role in this new situation of privatisation and big company involvement? What is the contribution of local NGOs such as the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE) and Environmental Quality International (EQI) as community advocates and of the wahiya as contractors to the Zabaleen's cause over the relocation of recycling activities to Eastern Cairo's new settlements? This issue relates to the role of NGOs in the governance of waste and the different modes of organising waste referred to earlier in Karré's study of the Dutch hybridisation of waste management (see Chapter Seven).

This chapter provides a historical review of the Zabaleen community, taking into account the early 1980s World Bank-funded Zabaleen Environmental Development Programme (ZEDP), coordinated by local NGO EQI (Fahmi, 2005). After introducing the Zabaleen rubbish recycling system, the next section discusses current plans to change drastically the solid waste management system for Cairo and the consequences of relocating the Zabaleen's settlement and recycling activities. Nevertheless the chapter examines these issues, employing local narratives recorded during focus group interviews and reactions to the threat of forced eviction as a result of potential state-controlled gentrification programmes for urban development and land speculation in the area.