The inevitable march of progress is largely viewed in a positive light – as technology advances and order is imposed on a disorderly world, things become better, right? Well, not necessarily, as we learn with the case of waste management in Cairo.

Residences in the capital were traditionally serviced by zabbaleen (Arabic for waste collectors), who started daily door-to-door collections in the 1940s. This stigmatised faction of society, which had migrated from the south of the country, lived on the outskirts of the city and survived by rearing pigs and goats on the organic waste picked up in Cairo’s more affluent neigbourhoods. In the 1950s, as plastics and metals entered the waste stream, the zabbaleen gained a source of extra income. And, as the city’s population ballooned from just two million in the 1940s to nearly 17 million today, so the waste collector population grew.

There were no laws to regulate the sector until the Cairo Cleansing and Beautification Authority was established in 1984, at which point it began licensing the zabbaleen, delineating their collection routes, allowing them to charge residents a fixed fee and charging them in turn. After paying middlemen (waahis) and the tax, waste collectors were often left with barely enough money to cover their costs.

Traditionally, the zabbaleen operated their service via donkey-pulled carts, but these were replaced by vehicles when the former were banned in 1990. Around seven people work on each collection route – men and children collect rubbish, while women stay home to sort and wash the material. Homes act as sorting stations; the average gets through a tonne a day!

Over time, recycling networks have grown up, allowing waste collectors to extract every ounce of value from their collections and achieve recycling rates of 80 to 85 per cent. A typical zabbaleen neighbourhood has small ‘recycling workshops’ dotted around to bale, granulate, pelletise and even manufacture new items. At the turn of the century, zabbaleen were servicing a third of Cairo’s residences.

Yet providing a valuable service doesn’t mean waste collectors’ lives are all sunshine and roses. A report for the German government, ‘The Waste Experts: Enabling Conditions for Informal Sector Integration in Solid Waste Management’ states: ‘They live in inhuman and humiliating circumstances and generally lack of sanitary services, health care and social benefits. Child labour is the rule… and life expectancy is low. Their task is carried out in the most dehumanising manner, with workers sorting through putrefying garbage.’

Things got even worse in 2003, as documented in the film Garbage Dreams. Cairo was producing 10,000 tonnes of rubbish a day, the majority of which was collected not by zabbaleen, but by local companies that hauled it to poorly-managed, fire-prone landfills. So, the government decided to hand waste services over to multinational corporations in an attempt to bring Cairo’s services in line with Western cities. Waste was now collected from communal bins in the streets, and the multinationals were contractually obligated to recycle 20 per cent.

The foray of large, international companies into Cairo’s waste services has been largely viewed as a failure. Local waste consultant, Dr Laila Iskandar, explains: “The people who designed the system had not factored in a few socio-economic aspects of their city: that it is home to an estimated 40.6 per cent of people below the poverty line… that this constitutes an eternal potential pool of scavengers… that residents had previously enjoyed a level of service that was now being reduced, and that they were now being asked to pay more… and that the multinationals would not be able to attract the labour they required… as the stigma attached to the occupation of garbage collecting acted as a barrier.”

Though the zabbaleen were a potential workforce for the companies, they would be expected to act as mere collection crews (without being able to bring the waste home), so their involvement has been limited. What’s more, the communal bins attract scavengers, who, Iskandar explains, steal containers and discard litter as they scavenge, resulting in high resident dissatisfaction; some residents pay for traditional waste collection service, as well as the official one they do not receive, while in some cases the corporations subcontract services to the zabbaleen.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, though, things are changing again. Iskandar explains: “The government of Egypt has given up on private companies to do household waste collection and are currently drafting new contracts and tendering processes to integrate the zabbaleen who have proven to be the only regular, reliable door-to-door collectors… Residents will not pay the zabbaleen directly as the exploitative relationship between the zabbaleen and the waahis and companies will be disentangled [and] the government will establish a new authority to oversee all waste management facilities, contracts, et cetera, in Egypt.”

A revolution cannot change things overnight, however; in some parts of the city, the waste contracts expire in 2017, meaning that change might come slowly. Iskandar implies that the spirit of the revolution lives on, though, suggesting: “We, as citizens, [could] act together to go to court and challenge the international contracts as part of the old, corrupt regime.” Whether that happens remains to be seen, but the country’s waste industry is most certainly in for some changes.