Despite promises that national companies as well as volunteers would work together to get rid of the rubbish that has long polluted the streets of Cairo, work on cleaning up the city and raising the awareness of citizens still needs to be done in order to implement President Mohamed Morsi's 100-day plan to clean up the city. Mohamed Hemeid, a university employee who lives in Abu Attata, a district of Giza, said he was “living a constant nightmare” because of the piles of rubbish near his home. “It is very bad here in Abu Attata, where people rarely come to take the rubbish away, meaning that residents are forced to set fire to it and almost every two days we see firemen called to extinguish the fires.” “We have been promised that a nearby channel would be transformed into covered drainage and the land turned into a garden, but it has been two years now and nothing has happened. We are afraid that the rubbish will cause disease in the meantime.” Mohamed Shawki, who works for the Giza General Authority for Cleanliness, said that his organisation was doing what it could, but that it had few resources. “People have bad habits. They throw rubbish into the streets because there are not enough rubbish bins. But people wouldn't throw their rubbish out at home in this way. One truck is not enough to carry all the rubbish that people throw out,” he said. According to Hafez Al-Said, chair of the Cairo General Authority for Cleanliness, the problem was a strategic one. “The point we disagree on with the private companies [responsible for many of the collections] is that we want cleanliness and they want to stick to their contracts. But these do not suit the Egyptian context, and they should have been signed based on proper research.” “In European countries, there is no such thing as a person who comes to collect rubbish from door-to-door, for example. People put their rubbish out, and companies come to collect it. It is illegal to throw rubbish anywhere else,” he said. “But such conditions do not always obtain in Egypt.” Another problem in Egypt was that people refused to have trash containers in front of their homes or shops, and even when the authorities had installed these “90 per cent of them were stolen or burnt or even thrown into canals.” “The companies only work one shift, which is not enough for a city as big as Cairo which has 37 districts and produces 40 per cent of the rubbish in Egypt. Another problem is that we owe these companies a lot of money, but due to the current financial circumstances we are unable to pay it to them and this in turn has negative effects on their performance,” Al-Said said. “It is unfair to hold the companies responsible for the current environmental crisis,” commented Abdel-Moeti Zaki, manager of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Giza. “It is a joint responsibility between these companies, the citizens, and the government. Another thing is that scientific experts only make up some 15 per cent of employees at the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs and the top jobs have gone to the military or police, who account for 85 per cent of the staff.” “We have found that many of the projects that international organisations paid millions of dollars for during the time of successive governments never existed,” because of mismanagement. “We are still working in terms of short-term planning, which has been proven to be ineffective, and we need long-term strategic planning as well,” Zaki said. Abdallah Al-Shazli, a spokesman for the AMA Arab Environment Company, sometimes known as the “Italian Company”, summed up the problems faced by his company in collecting Cairo's rubbish. “We had the problem of the traditional rubbish-collectors, as we wanted to depend on our own workers but the authorities said there were some 4,000 families working in the field and we had to make a deal with them to work under our umbrella.” “The problem is also a financial one. Any two parties who have signed a contract have rights and obligations. But there have been a lot of strikes because no salaries have been paid recently. This is a phase the whole country has been going through, and it has had effects on the performance of the company.” The company was doing its best despite the difficult situation the country was going through, he said. “Our workers were present during the Revolution and were cleaning the streets and squares. We were working closely with the army. Our trucks were stolen and others were set on fire. There have been amendments to our contract with the state, but not to the benefit of the company.” “Switzerland is the cleanest country in the world but not because it has the biggest cleaning company in the world. It has cleaning companies the size of those in Egypt. The problem is not the size of the companies contracted to deal with the rubbish. The problem is a lack of awareness. We are the only people who believe we have a right to throw rubbish about anytime and anywhere. The foreign companies working in Egypt are under a lot of stress as a result,” Al-Shazli said. The AMA Arab Company is an Egyptian-Italian company founded in 2002. It stated working in northern Cairo in the districts of Shubra, Rod Al-Farag, Al-Sahel, Al-Zawiya, Al-Sharabiya, Al-Hadayek and Al-Zeitoun. In 2003, the company was assigned to work in western areas including Al-Waili, Al-Sheriaya, Al-Mosqui, Boulaq, Zamalek, Garden City, and Mansheyet Nasser as well. The company specialises in collecting rubbish from the streets, and it is the first to carry out a door-to-door collection system. Zaki said that the FJP had an environmental programme designed to deal with the rubbish problems the country was facing. “We have a department called the Secretariat of Planning and Development, which includes 22 sections including energy, tourism, agriculture, education, culture, and environment. The department was founded even before the present government. Even if we were not part of the government, we would study the performance of the ministries, the issues they are working on, the strategies they use, and the laws that govern them, so that when we are given a task in a certain government we will be ready to work on it straightaway. We are like a shadow government organised by the opposition in a democracy.” The FJP's environmental department was one of the first to be established, he said, and it depended on experts from different fields. It was working closely with the Cairo qovernorate and the General Authority for Cleanliness. Zaki said that he believed that in the long run the tables would be turned on the rubbish problem. “There are factories, including one to be established in Al-Daqahliya, which are working on recycling and should enable savings of LE40 million. The idea is to look to the Turkish example of dealing with rubbish as a source of wealth due to materials that can be recycled and used in many products, including organic waste which can be manufactured into bio-gas, an ozone-friendly gas that can be used to power factories. We should deal with this issue carefully and wisely.” “We have been supervising environmental committees in Cairo and Giza composed of Party members, NGOs and volunteers. We have been working with the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs, and we are working on the contracts that should be signed with the recycling companies. Turkey has promised to give us cleaning equipment. We have been planning a recycling project with eight governorates, and we have already chosen locations.” “We are working on re-engineering the environmental system and redrafting the current environmental laws. We are looking at ways of covering time slots that the companies don't work in, like in the evening and late at night, and we have been appointing new workers and buying new equipment,” Al-Said added. “We are also considering the steps we should take after the contracts have ended. For example, we have already started to sign contracts with national companies to start working in small quarters like Al-Maasara and Helwan. We want to avoid mistakes in the new contracts we sign with the companies.” According to Al-Said, the governorate signed a contract with two foreign cleaning companies in 2003, and has been working with them for 11 years now. The contracts last for 15 years and will end in 2017. The function of these companies, according to the contracts, is cleaning, collecting, sweeping, transporting, and recycling rubbish. Cairo's rubbish-collection bills amount to around LE175 million per year, he said. The contracts signed are worth LE500 million per year, and the government pays the rest of the sum. The problem of accumulating trash in Cairo and Giza has been going on since at least 2009, when the governor of Cairo, Abdel-Azim Wazir, warned the companies working in the city that they would face severe penalties if they did not take the tasks in their contracts seriously. This was not the last warning, as in July 2012 the new governor, Abdel-Kawi Khalifa, warned the companies that deficiencies would mean that the district would employ a national company instead at their expense. In 2009, the Giza Governorate increased the number of workers and shifts used, in an attempt to deal with the accumulating rubbish. In September of the same year, contracts were rewritten to include conditions such as canceling them if the company was penalised more than 25 per cent of the time. The General Authority for Cleanliness is supposed to supervise rubbish collections, and all parties must sign any penalty declaration on the spot. Nevertheless, as a result of accumulating rubbish more and more rats have been seen in the streets of the Sharqiya, Ismailia, Suez, Fayoum, Beni Sweif and Minya governorates. In 2010, Wazir rewrote the contracts with the Italian company responsible to try to ensure that workers worked during the holidays and got higher salaries of around LE1,100. In 2011, Ali Abdel-Rahman, the governor of Giza, gave workshops LE650,000 to mend rubbish-collecting vehicles and later appointed 25 graduates to monitor the performance of the companies working in Giza. In December 2012, the next governor of Cairo, Osama Kamal, banned people from throwing rubbish into rubbish bins from 8pm till 8am, in order to allow workers the time to collect it. Zaki believes the solution to the country's rubbish problems lies in greater expertise and placing experts where they belong. “One of the most important features of environmental management is the reorganisation of the authorities responsible for it,” he said. “For example, the function of the local council was only an advisory one in the past. Today, according to the new law, its function is to supervise, and it has the right to put questions to the governor. The new environmental law will ensure that the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs is represented in each ministry that it works with. Before punishing anyone, you should raise awareness by the work of NGOs, mosques, and churches.” “Awareness comes gradually. We should coordinate with those who are experienced in the field of recycling, like the Copts. We are currently exchanging expertise with Turkey by sending our young people there to learn from them.” According to Al-Shazli, the solution lies in everyone playing their part effectively. “We have a hotline for complaints that covers the areas we work in. Our supervisors have mobile phones to receive complaints and to act fast. We have been organising awareness classes in mosques, churches, NGOs and youth centres. This is an integrated system, and whenever one part malfunctions, the rest are affected. Before we manage to raise the awareness of the older generation, we have to raise that of the new generation by teaching them how to deal with rubbish and not the opposite, which is happening now.” “We should start thinking what we will do tomorrow and not just wait until the contracts with the foreign companies end. The authority should be prepared to take over the cleaning process by hiring more collectors and buying new equipment,” Al-Said said. Hemeid called on the authorities to intervene before it was too late. “Those in charge of cleanliness must do something about the lack of cleanliness in Egypt,” he said.
