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I’m in a school, but not as visiting author this time. I’m with a group of waste management specialists (including my husband) who are visiting the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Recycling School in Moqattam in Cairo. It’s an unusual, but exciting school. It caters for the boys of the Zabbaleen community of informal recyclers – they used to be informal garbage collectors – what we’d have once called rag-pickers - but things have moved on.
The Zabbaleen originally came to Cairo from the countryside, and started to work sorting through the refuse of the more prosperous neighbourhoods, picking out whatever could be recycled, and selling it to middlemen. They lived in shanties, with heaps of waste lying in front of the dwellings. Here the families sorted the refuse and the pigs rootled through to pick out the organic matter and eat it. It wasn’t a bad system, especially not the input of the pigs, who produced both meat and fertiliser, but it wasn’t very healthy, and child mortality was high. Enter Laila Iskandar, who started off the girls’ school here. The girls recycled clean paper and textiles and learned, at the same time, literacy and basic hygiene. Nowadays, you may well buy the handmade paper they make in outlets in the West – lovely paper in beautiful colours and patterns. Their textile products – recycled from industry’s offcuts - are selling to fashion outlets in Europe. The Zabbaleen are intelligent, resourceful people who have taken every opportunity that’s been given them and run with it. Some of the first graduates from the girls’ school have gone on to university.
So, twenty-seven years on from Laila’s first visit, things look very different. The Zabbaleen now have brick-built houses, from whose windows and balconies hang beautifully clean laundry. There are still people sorting refuse, but that is done, largely, in workshops, separate from the dwellings. And now much of the actual recycling is done in Moqattam, which means the Zabbaleen can sell plastic pellets on to factories, though in some instances they make plastic products too. We visit one of the recycling workshops, where a £50,000 machine melts the plastic into an endless sausage of curiously pleasing hot gunk and feeds it into an extruder, fro
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