Garbage City
recycling trash into a living
In a desert metropolis of 22 million, many things are scarce, and few are as abundant as trash. For decades, Cairo lacked an organized approach to waste management—an administrational gap filled by the people of Manshiyat Nasser, a neighborhood known as Garbage City.
For about 70 years, the mainly Coptic Christian population has put its faith in the garbage the city provides, recollecting the things that are no longer useful in their current shape, and recycling them into a living.
Garbage City looks like a landfill fell from the sky and covered an otherwise typical Cairo neighborhood with trash—trash on rooftops, trash in the streets, trash filling houses, mountains of trash on seas of trash.
But what looks like a mess, is in fact a highly efficient system that churns out recycling at a staggering rate of 85 %, more than four times the global average. After all, trash is money.
