How It's Done In The Village

This is a photo trash collection in my village.  The women and children sort trash collected by the recyclers and put it into these huge bags which are themselves recycled feed bags. Most people have poultry to take care of organic waste. The inorganic gets collected.

Antiquities Trash...AGAIN!

There is an area out in the desert behind the Step Pyramid where the Sakkara Antiquities people dump their dig debris. This is an interesting place to ride as there are bits of ancient mudbrick, old bones, bits of pottery and so on. However, lately they have also been dumping basic garbage out there and that is NOT ok. Every so often I post photos of this to try to bring it to the SCA's attention. This particular dump site is on an old road out into the desert and anyone doing a camel or donkey ride from the Step Pyramid would be riding right by it. Bad SCA!

Wake Up Call!!

I really hate posting ugly pictures of Egypt when there is so much beauty here, but every now and then I have to in hopes of helping people care for our country. The government (old government) built an extension of the Ring Road to connect the end of the Moneeb coming from Kattameya to the part of the ring road that circled around to the north of the city. Originally the road was intended to go around behind the Giza Plateau but UNESCO blocked that route arguing that the construction was not good in an antiquities area. Just last fall someone put up some tent material along the canal just where the extension took off from ground level and began dumping garbage there. Now every day trucks come and dump load after load of smelly gross garbage under the overpass while bulldozers dig it up again and put it in big trucks to move somewhere else instead.

All of this is incredibly stupid. Instead of investing money in the Zebaleen who recycle roughly 80% of the waste they collect, we are paying people to move it around in trucks, using gasoline and polluting the air further. And it goes to landfills, which as might be expected, FILL UP!

The Neverending Problem

When the Ring Road around Cairo was first built, action by UNESCO and other groups stopped the construction of the portion that was to go around the back of the Giza plateau. The dirt road base of the proposed route that can be glimpsed running over the hill in front of the jeep has since become a well-used thoroughfare despite the fact that it was never paved, and trucks and cars use it to make a short cut to the Fayoum road. The other use of the paved portion of the road has lately been as a place to dump garbage. A newspaper article a while back shamed the authorities into cleaning up the sides of the road, but within a week or so, the trucks were back at it. These photos were shot today when I was on my way back home from town. What a bloody shame!

Your Canal Is Burning

I remember as a child reading that a river in Chicago had caught fire. The image stuck in my mind quite firmly and as I was driving into town near the army base at Beni Yusuf, I saw to my astonishment that the debri on the canal was burning. A man standing over the fire on the bridge was watching it burn and I suspect that he set the fire but he moved off rather quickly. Good thing too, because most of what was burning was plastic and the fumes would have been pretty toxic.

Trash Collection Take One

Cairo has had the gift of a unique group of people, the zebaleen, literally "the garbage people", a group of people who originally moved to Cairo from Upper Egypt in the 40's and who took on the job of collecting and recycling Cairo's trash. Eventually they were told to move out of the (then) city limits to areas such as the Moqattam Hills. You can read more about them at the Ford Foundation site http://www.fordfound.org/elibrary/documents/5008/055.cfm Zebaleen Develop Incomes and Community from an Overlooked Asset.

Although in an effort to "modernise" the government has hired companies to collect trash, we still see the donkey carts that carry the soon to be recycled items to the workshops.