Northeast of the City of the Dead is another of Cairo’s
unique areas, the quarter of the zabbaleen, or trash collectors.
They are Coptic Christians who have collected and sorted
Cairo’s trash for generations. As most Cairenes (residents of
Cairo) sleep, the zabbaleen cover almost every nook and cranny
of the city collecting the waste in straw baskets. They load the
trash onto a donkey-pulled cart in the street and by daybreak
return to their base. Here they begin sorting the waste: Paper,
plastic, glass, metal, and other materials are separated into vari-
ous piles, and organic waste is directed to a giant compost heap.
Very little of this waste actually ends up as waste. Most of it is
recycled so that, for example, you may buy a bag of peanuts in
which the bag is a rather clean sheet of paper on which a stu-
dent did homework a few days earlier. The recycling is profit-
able for the zabbaleen. Although their part of the city has giant
mounds of refuse, the people are not poor, and they have come
far with their enterprise. Recently, they won an official contract
to collect Cairo’s waste, beating bids for more modern, motor-
ized Western-style collection systems. They also won a presti-
gious United Nations environmental award that recognized the
Earth-friendliness of their labors.