Zabbaleen

The Zabbaleen (زبالين Zabbalīn, zæbbæˈliːn) is a word which literally means "garbage people" in Egyptian Arabic. The contemporary use of the word in Egyptian Arabic is to mean "garbage collectors". In cultural contexts, the word refers to teenagers and adults who have served as Cairo's informal garbage collectors since approximately the 1940s. The Zabbaleen (singular: زبال Zabbāl, zæbˈbæːl) are also known as Zarraba (singular: Zarrab), which means "pig-pen operators." The word Zabbalīn came from the Egyptian Arabic word zebāla (zeˈbæːlæ, زبالة) which means "garbage". Spread out among seven different settlements scattered in the Greater Cairo Urban Region, the Zabbaleen population is between 50,000 and 70,000. The largest settlement is Mokattam village, nicknamed "Garbage City," located at the foot of the Mokattam Plateau, next to Manshiyat Nasser. The Zabbaleen community has a population of around 20,000 to 30,000, over 90 percent of which are poor Coptic Christians living in self-built homes, many in slum conditions. For several generations, the Zabbaleen supported themselves by collecting trash door-to-door from the residents of Cairo for nearly no charge. Notably, the Zabbaleen recycle up to 80 percent of the waste that they collect via local Egyptian companies, whereas most Western garbage collecting companies can only recycle 20 to 25 percent of the waste that they collect. The Zabbaleen use donkey-pulled carts and pickup trucks to transport the garbage that they collect from the residents of Cairo, transport the garbage to their homes in Mokattam Village, sort the garbage there, and then sell the sorted garbage to middlemen or create new materials from their recycled garbage. The living situation for the Zabbaleen is poor, especially since they live amongst the trash that they sort in their village and with the pigs to which they feed their organic waste. Nevertheless, the Zabbaleen have formed a strong and tight-knit community.