Where on earth would you find a Christian community making a living out of collecting smelly old rubbish – and one which has built a 20,000-seat church for itself out of almost solid rock?
The answer is Cairo, Egypt, and these real life Wombles are the Zabbaleen, or ‘garbage collectors’ in Arabic. They collect about 3,000 tonnes a day of the city’s waste and recycle about 80% of it – a dramatic improvement on most western cities, which barely reach 25%.
It is a remarkably efficient system. At night the Zabbaleen men pick up as much street rubbish as they can – cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, wood, rags, tins. They then take it back to their neighbourhood, packed tightly into large parcels, tied together with rope, precariously perched on the top of motorised bikes, carts or lorries. The rubbish is then deposited, separated and sorted. Food waste is fed to locally kept pigs, while cans and bottles are packed tightly together and sold to recycling companies, which are now starting to accept plastic waste too.
