Raised In The Trash Trade: Lessons In Recycling From Cairo's Slums

You might think that the world's most effective recycling program would be in a high-tech, first world country backed by R&D funding and PhDs. Actually, it's teenagers in a slum on the outskirts of Cairo who have a lot to teach the global green brigade. A daring new documentary, "Garbage Dreams: Raised in the Trash Trade," reveals how for a century an ostracized community in the Muslim world's largest metropolis has been eking out a living by gathering the city's waste and how their rudimentary methods yield a much higher recycling rate than the more sophisticated ones implemented in the West.

For decades, Cairo has had no sanitation service, but relied on 60,000 Zaballeen, or "garbage people," who ride on donkeys or on trucks collecting trash and bringing it back to their Garbage City, as its known. Living amidst enormous piles of refuse, the Zaballeen sort the discarded garbage into piles for recycling. They earn little, but in a country where almost half of the population survives on less than $2 a day, it's a livelihood. Or has been.

Read more on Indagare