In his 100-day plan to address major issues in the country, President Mohamed Mursi announced the Clean Nation Campaign in the hope of cleaning the streets of the cities. While the campaign was hailed by some, it doesn't address the pressing problems of solid wastes management in Egypt A long way to cleanliness The presidential initiative to clean up the country is promising. But it is not enough, argues Dena Rashed It doesn't take a pro to know that Egypt's waste-management problem has reached a serious juncture. Taking a walk in the streets of many cities and villages, whether upmarket or shanty, it is easy to see that garbage has been piling up. Last Saturday, the officials concerned were alerted to the Clean Nation Campaign, in which the Cairo and Giza Beautification Authorities and the municipalities geared up to remove the heaps of garbage that have been piling up for months. In support of president Mohamed Morsi's two-day campaign, young people from the Justice and Freedom Party put on special uniforms to support the 100-day plan of their former Party head and current Egyptian president. While many will have been relieved to see trucks removing rubbish, for anyone aware of the persistent problems of solid-waste management in Egypt, this is little more than a field trip. Trucks might be able to clear the streets for a few days, but consistency is the key. "We can call this initiative 'high-spirited,' but that is all I can call it. An initiative without a strategy or a system won't last for more than a couple of days," Sobhi Abdel-Masih, head of the Abnaa Horus NGO in Ezbet al-Nakhl, an area lived in by the traditional rubbish-collectors, the zabaleen, told the Weekly. The zabaleen, who immigrated to Cairo from distant towns and villages, have long collected the city's rubbish, sorting it and feeding organic waste to their pigs. Their presence is taken for granted, but their absence is hugely noticeable. By 2001, the traditional way of doing things had changed with the advent of foreign solid-waste management companies operating in Alexandria, Cairo and Giza. Since then, the country's solid-waste management system has seen ups and downs, from visions of sparklingly clean streets and sanitary landfills to times of hazy planning, lack of awareness and tensions between the zabaleen, the governorates and the foreign companies. Fast forward almost 10 years and the image is uglier. Heaps of garbage can be seen piled up on pavements, and citizens are still paying garbage collection fees on their electricity bills, while others are just dumping rubbish on the pavements. Some of the foreign companies have left, and the zabaleen still feel neglected and out of the loop. Abdel-Masih arrived in Cairo in 1984 and since then he has been part of the zabaleen community and has witnessed how the trade started. For the past 11 years, he says, they have been marginalised. "No one took us into consideration when the foreign companies started operating, and until now we aren't on the official development map," he said. While many zabaleen have been subcontracted by the companies, Abdel-Masih says that they were promised land by the government, onto which they would be moved in order to be able to sort out the garbage properly and to raise their pigs. However, this project still has not come to fruition. In 2009 when Egypt was affected by the Swine Flu, the government began slaughtering the pigs, yet the consequences of such a measure weren't calculated. The pigs used to feed on the organic waste and so the zabaleen stopped collecting it leaving it to litter the streets. Abdel-Masih says the zabaleen are now growing pigs again, but the numbers don't exceed 500. The idea of contracting companies to collect trash, clean the streets, build sanitary landfills and develop recycling plants was, and is, a good one. But the downside has been that from the day it started the zabaleen were expected to join in. But how? No one has had a clear answer. Some might call it lack of organisation; however, it could just as well be called lack of vision. Imagining that a system that works in other countries would necessarily work in Egypt has proved wrong. Looking back should have helped officials to understand the depth of the solid-waste management problem in Egypt, but the only talk heard on the news was how the campaign would help to remove the garbage. The Egyptian notion of pretending to do things has long relied on the familiar figure of the person who sweeps the house by shoving the dirt under the carpet. There are strong similarities with reality here, as the tons of garbage that were removed under the foreign system were often thrown into open landfills, transferring the problem to other areas. It has been great to see clean streets in areas where people's lives are affected by increasing amounts of garbage, and it has been good to encourage them not to throw garbage into the streets. But sustaining such acts is what makes a country really clean. Rizk Nadi, a young man in his early twenties, drives a pick-up truck in the fancy side streets of Heliopolis to load garbage bags. As the doormen line up the black garbage bags for him, he puts on his black leather gloves and gets ready for work. He is a clear example of what it means to be side-tracked. Originally from Ezbet al-Nakhl, he has been a zabal for as long as he can remember. "I have heard of the Clean Nation initiative," he says. "But I don't think it is going to work out." "He isn't up to it," Nadi says, meaning the president. "There are many parties concerned, and if we aren't all included the system won't work properly. If you remove the garbage and throw it away, we will be out of business. Then what are we expected to do?" Nadi says that the zabaleen were not informed of their role in the Campaign, and he laments its happening. "When companies or officials want to make deals, they do so with the heads of the zabaleen even though this never pays off for us at the end." He remembers when the foreign companies first started operating, and the zabaleen were asked to work for them. "I was offered a job for LE500 per month. Peanuts, in fact." When the companies started working, there were many initiatives to include the zabaleen, and some of them succeeded, as in Alexandria where the Onyx Company agreed that the zabaleen would sort out the garbage they wanted in the trash bins and put the rest back for the companies to collect. Yet, as Yehia Ghanem, a consultant on solid-waste management told the Weekly, "the solid-waste management system applied in Egypt has not been a good one. At the end of the day, the technical part of running solid-waste management isn't the most important. It is management that is the key to the process." Ghanem, also a board member of the Enhancement of Integrated Services and Waste Recycling Company, says that it is important to include all stakeholders in the field of solid-waste management and efficiently to manage them. "I believe the Clean Nation Campaign is coming too late. The system was supposed to be established first, so that people could be invited to join afterwards. But in this case what will happen is for the waste to be removed for a couple of days, and then, as long as the system is not fixed, the garbage will pile up again. People will be frustrated and discouraged from participating in it again," he said. Ghanem highlights how the zabaleen can only be successfully incorporated in the system if their role is properly understood. "The zabaleen have experience in collecting and recycling garbage, so they wouldn't want to work in the streets, because it has never been their job to do so," he says. By contrast, Enhancement, an Egyptian company, has been contracted to clean various urban areas, including the low-income district of Zeinhom in Cairo. It managed to create its own system, and at the same time watched how the foreign companies handled the job in the early years. The main problem that needed attention in the early years was the contracts signed between the governorates and the companies, with complaints focusing on how the governorates monitored the companies' work. While one company might collect garbage twice a day, people might still throw their rubbish out at different times, making it impossible to achieve a satisfactory result. The governorate monitors started issuing fines to the companies for non-compliance with their contracts, and the problems snowballed. "It became a chicken-and-egg situation. When the companies are fined, they get paid less and thus the service gets affected. So a review was needed of supervision issues, and the companies needed to improve their waste collection," Ghanem said. Self-monitoring, raising awareness and appointing youth and retired citizens in Zeinhom as community leaders were what Ghanem says managed to make the difference in his experience. It is against this background that on Monday presidential spokesperson Yasser Ali announced that the president intended to transform his temporary initiative into an institution called "Clean Nation". What this institution will do and how and with what authority is still unclear. How much it will cost taxpayers is also not known. Given the existence of municipality offices, Cleaning and Beautification Authorities and a ministry of the environment, as well as foreign companies contracted for millions of pounds, it is clear that Egypt doesn't lack institutions. What it lacks is management and organisational skills, not to mention executive power in the hands of the ministry actually to implement the law. An efficient system would be one that sent as little waste as possible to landfills, "ensuring efficient recycling and a better life-span for the landfill." In Egypt, there are three types of landfill: open, semi-closed and sanitary. Onyx, which used to manage the waste of Alexandria, has been the only company able to establish an efficient sanitary landfill, while AMA in Cairo built one that is not as sophisticated, according to Ghanem. Other companies didn't build landfills at all, possibly owing to red tape, as was the case for IES in Giza some years ago. Ghanem says that in some systems up to 95 per cent of waste can be recycled. He is optimistic that such systems could be introduced in Egypt, "otherwise I wouldn't still be working." He believes that the most important thing is good management. "Contracts should be financially evaluated, services better monitored, the number of zabaleen made proportional to the number of residential apartments, and the number of employees made proportional to the number of residential units," he says. Any meaningful rubbish campaign should address the collection, sorting, recycling and disposal of waste. Addressing the role, duties and shortcomings of all partners and discussing ways to enhance recycling efforts in Egypt is what could really guarantee sustainability beyond a one-week spree of cleaning and sweeping.
