Pres. Morsi Vows to Solve Egypt’s Staggering ‘Trash Crisis’ in 100 Days http://www.theblaze.com/stories/morsi-vows-to-solve-egypts-staggering-trash-crisis-in-100-days/ via @theblaze
7:48 PM - 1 Sep 12 · Details
PRES. MORSI VOWS TO SOLVE EGYPT’S STAGGERING ‘TRASH CRISIS’ IN 100 DAYS
(Photo: AP)
(The Blaze/AP) — The pile of trash overwhelmed the median divider on Ahmed Zaki Street and spilled into oncoming traffic – egg shells, rotten eggplants, soiled diapers, bottles, broken furniture, junked TV sets. Flies swarmed and the summer sun baked up a powerful stench.
Then Kawther Ahmed and her mom came out to add their plastic bag of household trash. The garbage collectors hadn’t been by for two days, said Ahmed, 25, and the metal trash bins in the lower-income Cairo neighborhood, called Dar el-Salam or “House of Peace,” had disappeared, probably sold for scrap metal. “What can we do?” she asked.
Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, is under growing pressure to answer that question.
He already faces a host of challenges: from secular Egyptians worried about his Islamist doctrines; from militants trying to stoke conflict with Israel, and from the poverty and joblessness that fed the Arab Spring and brought down the three-decade dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
To all those, add the rising tide of garbage in Cairo, the world’s largest Arab city. Morsi declared it one of his top five priorities, promising to clean up the streets within 100 days. In so doing, he gave the electorate a powerful way of measuring his abilities, and it looks increasingly certain that 100 days will be nowhere near enough.
(Photo: AP)
Cairo‘s waste management problem worsened significantly a decade ago as the capital’s old system, simple but reliable, became swamped by population growth. A government modernization effort flopped. A swine flu panic prompted the mass slaughter of the pigs that recycled Cairo’s organic garbage; the city’s metal trash bins were easy prey for thieves, especially during the global scrap metal boom.
In Dar-el-Salam, as in many other parts of the city of 18 million, there is no one to hold back the “nabasheen,” the diggers – young men and women who rummage through the bags of plastic, glass and cardboard and leave the organic stuff to rot in the streets.
Morsi is wading into a landfill of interwoven problems. Rival collectors vying for the big business of trash fight over turf that used to be parceled out in an orderly way among a fixed number of garbage-collecting clans. Layers of corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy choke the system. The collapse of police forces in the revolution in early 2011 means that no one is enforcing what few rules there are.
As a result, Cairenes end up dumping much of their daily output of 17,000 tons of garbage on the street.
(Photo: AP)
“We have designed an unsustainable system for the city,” said Laila Iskandar, an expert in waste management. “It is a chain and no one thinks of the chain. Only the end point … Out of sight out of mind.”
In late July, Morsi launched a “Clean Homeland” campaign, giving free brooms and plastic bags to volunteers from civic groups and the Muslim Brotherhood to which Morsi belongs. They hit several Cairo districts, helped by local authorities, for two days and then turned it into a weekly campaign. They swarm the streets, removing piles of trash.
But the garbage quickly returns.
In Ahmed’s neighborhood in south Cairo, residents say, the volunteers kept watch for hours to fend off dumpers and diggers. “Even the girls were collecting garbage. The street was sparkling,” said Mamdouh Gamea, a dentist. “But it didn’t last. It is a matter of behavior.”
Waleed el-Senoussi, manager of the Clean Homeland campaign and hygiene file in Morsi’s office, said the idea was to define the problems and come up with solutions. The government, he said in an interview, wants to tackle the problem on a national level and issue bids for a more technological system that includes burning waste for energy.
In this photo taken in Sunday, May 20, 2012, an Egyptian Coptic Christian boy, Mina Anwar, looks on as he stands next to garbage bags, in the Moqattam area in Cairo, Egypt, where more than 60,000 Christians known as the Zabaleen, or "garbage people," collect, separate, sell or reuse the city's trash. (Photo: AP)
“The big strategy is to turn the garbage from a pain, a burden and a problem into a product that has a market value,” he said. “It is unreasonable to solve our problems by going backward.”
