On garbage; recycling and garbage disposal in different countries

My recent post on the sad and terrifying events in Austria has generated a lot of responses for which I am very grateful (thank you, contributors!). I think we all agree that it’s an awful, horrible thing (although as an adamant opponent to the death penalty, I can’t agree to that Josef Fritzl deserves to be put to death – as tempting as it may be to make an ideological exception in a case like this). Some of the comments however relied on assumptions about my sophistication within a certain field that were not on spot, and it made me realize that since I started this blog on our life in Egypt, I have neglected to discuss one very important, and to any society essential matter: garbage.

I come from one of the most environmentally conscious countries in the world. Households sort everything, and almost all trash is accounted for and recycled when physically possible. Food waste goes into an ecological compost, plastic is sorted separately, cans, metal, milk cartons, paper, glass – everything is separated and handled. I grew up in a house without a basement, so we had a special edifice attached to the garage where everything was put into separate containers and either picked up or taken to the recycling station by my father on Saturday mornings. A lot of people kept their sorted garbage in their basements though, even people that lived in ‘multiple family houses’ as we would call them. (You find this type of house all over Europe as well in the United States.) Individual responsibility for the environment always seemed natural to me since I was little.

In Belgium, where I spent most of my adult life, garbage is also sorted, if not as meticulously by everyone as in Sweden, and entails mainly five matters: food waste goes into a green garbage bag picked up by the city every Friday, plastic containers and aluminum cans go into a blue bag picked up by the city every other week, paper is picked up by various volunteer organizations about once a month, glass is brought to special containers by the individual, and finally, all other garbage goes into brown bags picked up by the city every other week. The garbage bags have to be purchased at a store or at the city hall and are quite costly, especially the brown bags, so limiting waste is always sought after.

Since I only ever lived in the United States as a student, I don’t really know how garbage is handled there, but I know our family doesn’t sort anything really; they pay the same for garbage pickup no matter how they’ve sorted their trash, so I suppose it’s not really worth it.

Finally, here in Egypt, things are different from anywhere. The individual puts everything in the same garbage bag, so there’s no established household recycling process, but on the way from our kitchen to the dump, somehow our trash gets sorted and eventually recycled. At first it was very difficult for me to throw glass in the trash, or beer cans (in Sweden you even get money back for plastic bottles and cans!), but then I noticed what happens to trash in the streets. We put our trash outside our apartment door, and the bowab (our doorman) puts it out on the street. Sometime during the wee hours of the morning, people from all over; individuals, joint enterprises – nobody really knows – comes along and goes through all the trash, and removed whatever is recyclable. I’ve seen tons of glass for example behind a store or in a certain space, but there’s no official way it got there. After these mysterious people have gone through the trash for recyclable material, other people poke through it as well; poor, poor people, and then the cats, dogs and other animals come and scatter pretty much the rest. What is left of the original pile is picked up by garbage pick-up trucks run by barefoot, dirty children sometime during the hot, sunny day, but since animals don’t exactly poke through the trash nicely, a lot of things that are scattered don’t make the pick, and a large amount of the trash remains on the ground, in the streets and the green areas. From what I hear, Maadi is better than some other areas in Cairo, but it’s still the dirties city I’ve ever lived in, and the society class division makes change difficult.

The other day I overheard two men talking about their overseas jobs here in Egypt; one man was working for an organization that deals with work safety, and the other man was an US AID environmentalist, and they were comparing the amount of work within the respective fields that is needed in this country. Seeing that construction scaffolds here are made up of ropes and broken pieces of wood and that people in construction die all the time, the work safety man was able to make quite an argument, but as I walked home in the evening, unable to see clearly because of all the car exhaust in the air, looking at the trees, stepping on garbage, avoiding dirty and sick stray cats and dogs, I thought to myself that the environment really should come first, and it’s everybody’s responsibility, no matter how wealthy.