A Recycler’s Travels in Egypt
The following was written by Colleen McSwiggin, Executive Director of the Cincinnati Recycling & Reuse Hub.
This past March, I had the good fortune of crossing a trip off of my “bucket list” – Egypt! I had literally wanted to see the Valley of the Kings since I was 8 years old, after I went through all the old editions of National Geographic that my dad kept on the big bookcase in the basement and pulled out the ones that “looked interesting”. (Plans to visit Ireland, Loch Ness, and Pompeii and Herculaneum were also added to the list at that time. I’ve managed to go to Ireland, but Nessie and Italy are still waiting for my arrival.) Although I went for the history (where else can you stand in a 3000-year-old temple filled with 80-foot-tall pillars and marvel at how they were built?), I knew that modern Egypt would be an amazing look into a culture that was, in many ways, entirely different from my own. As we drove around in our air-conditioned tour bus, it was sobering to see the hundreds of thousands of people who were still farming relatively small plots of land, sowing seeds and harvesting produce by hand, in much the same manner that had been used since the “dawn of civilization” about 12,000 years ago. Although many Egyptians live what could be considered by some to be “small” lives (one of our tour guides mentioned the average annual income for most Egyptians is about US $600), in many ways, they’re more in tune with the world around them – acutely aware of rainfall (or lack thereof), flooding of the Nile (although that’s better controlled since the Aswan High Dam was completed in the 1970s), vector-borne diseases, and the effects all of those things have on their daily lives.
Knowing how many places we can go with things for recycling and reuse at the Hub, I was keen to see how waste was handled in Egypt. Not knowing what to expect, I was struck by how little waste infrastructure there was in Cairo (the 6th largest metropolitan area in the world) and for smaller cities farther south, like Luxor and Aswan. Although some tourist areas had garbage cans and some recycling collection containers, I never saw any kind of trash or recycling truck and most areas (at least in Cairo) seemed to have designated one lot as the neighborhood trash dump, where we routinely saw people, including young children, and animals, including goats, dogs, and donkeys, picking through the refuse. Flying into Luxor one night, open burn pits lit up the darkness near the airport, and we could smell the smoke as we got out of the plane. Plastic bags were everywhere – in the irrigation channels fed by the Nile and in the river itself, on streets, and flying through the air, even in places like the Valley of the Kings and the temples of Abu Simbel, which is one of the more remote places in Egypt. It was disheartening on many levels, but, when you realize that most people are just trying to survive, you understand why recycling and fighting climate change are not high on their list of priorities.
Seeing the poverty in Egypt made me want to redouble our efforts at the Hub, since we have the privilege of being in a place where we CAN do something about climate change, which is and will continue to hit the most vulnerable communities the hardest. Because we see reducing resource use as a moral imperative, we continually try to find more places to send more items, and, when we eventually move to our permanent home, we’ll be able to do even more, with plans for on-site composting, cold storage for rescued food, and collections for items we can’t currently accept. Thank you for helping the Hub to get this far – over 250 tons diverted from the landfill in a little over two years! On to the next 100 tons!